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REV. ROBERT COLLYER'S BOOKS. 

TALKS TO YOUNG MEN (with Asides 

to Young 'Women). Cloth $1 25 

THE LIFE THAT NO^W IS. Sermons. 

With Portrait. Cloth 1 50 

NATURE AND LIFE. Sermons. 

Cloth 1 50 

A MAN IN EARNEST: Life of A. H. 

Conant. Cloth 1 50 

THE SIMPLE TRUTH. A Wedding 

Present. Small quarto. Cloth ... 1 00 

LEE AND SHEPARD, Publishers, Boston. 



TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 



{JVith Asides to Young Women) 



BY 

/ 

ROBERT COLLYER 

h 
MINISTER OF THE CHURCH OF THE MESSIAH 
NEW YORK 






BOSTON 
LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK 
CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM 

1888 

\ \ -. ^^ - ^ " 



''S 



Copyright, 1887, 
By lee and SHEPARD. 



All rights reserved. 



Talks to Young Men. 



I Dedicate this Little Book 

To WILLIAM H. BALDWIN 

President of the Young Men's Christian Union 

IN Boston 

With more than Twenty Years' worth of Loving Regard 



CONTENTS 



LECTURE PAGE 

I. The Joy of Youth i 

II. Godlike Temptations 20 

III. My New Name 35 

IV. In the Spirit S3 

V. Two Emigrants 73 

VI. Two Children 94 

VII. The Primitive Idea of a Good Wife. . . 115 

VIII. Debt 134 

IX. Sleep 153 

X. A Noble Anger 172 

XL Charles and Mary Lamb 188 

XII. The Companionship of Good Books ... 213 



AN INTRODUCTION 



" Though we are justices^ and doctors^ and churchmen. 
Master Page, we have some salt of our youth in us." 

It has been said that the Koran was made, 
but the Bible grew ; and I like to think some 
such distinction may be drawn in favor of 
this little book, no matter what may be its 
intrinsic quality. 

It has grown out of the impulse we all 
feel, who are called to the ministry of ''life 
unto life," to speak now and then to those 
whose life lies greatly before them, on ques- 
tions which seem to us of a deep and vital 
moment. So I have tried to speak as the 
spirit moved me, and then laid these Talks 
away with many more to ripen or rot — as 



vm AN INTRODUCTION 

some sorts of pears do — in my drawer ; and 
now, when I must make good an old promise 
to print such a book, those have been selected 
which seemed still to have some soundness 
in them, and some virtue of bitter or sweet. 

They are not to be taken, therefore, with 
quite the discount young men insist on 
usually from those who are growing old, that 
we have forgotten our own youth, and so 
are not the men best fitted now to talk 
to them of theirs ; and there is some truth 
in the plea. It is such **a far cry" away 
back to our own early life, and we all change 
so greatly in the course of, let us say, fifty 
years, that a man may well be out of touch 
with those who stand now where he stood 
then, and be bankrupt in sympathy, even if 
he has grown a trifle richer in wisdom. I 
would fain believe this is not the gravest 
fault young readers will find in my little book. 
These are not the belated blossoms of a St. 
Martin's summer : they are the fruit, rather, 



AN INTRODUCTION ix 

of the whole happy summer of my ministry, 
and hold, I trust, some measure of its wine. 

But if it be not so, we whose heads have 
grown white do not think we should allow 
that discount when we speak to those who 
stand at the morning-tide, and are ready to 
enter the busy world we must leave when 
our day's work is done. At Hampton Court, 
in England, they have what they call a maze. 
It is a narrow path, with a high thick hedge 
of yew, if I remember, on either side, over 
which you cannot look. Well, they set you 
to walk into the heart of this maze, and then 
out again, and it seems simple enough as you 
go in ; but presently you take the wrong turn, 
as I did, and then you wander right and 
left, get bewildered, lose confidence in your 
steps, and feel like giving up. But then you 
find there is a man standing on an eminence 
above the maze, who cries to you, " Now take 
that turn, and now this ; " and so at last he 
brings you to the heart of it, and then out 



X AN INTRODUCTION 

again to your great content. And so, if we 
have won any worth out of all the years, 
may not this be counted with the rest, and 
allowed, that we stand somewhat above the 
maze, on this vantage-ground to which we 
have found our way, it may be, through much 
losing, alas for us ! and through listening, too, 
for our direction, as we want our youth to 
listen ; and cry to them also of the way they 
shall take into the heart of life, and then 
out again ; and so the play of a summer's 
holiday becomes a parable of the maze into 
which we must all venture. 

This is what we may be to the youth of 
our time, if they will hear and heed us ; and 
this is what I would claim for worth, again, 
in these pages. My own life has lain in hard 
and rough places, as well as in these which 
are all my heart can desire, and I have spoken 
from the centre, touching many things one 
must touch delicately and with due reserve. 
"There goes John Newton, but for God's 



AN INTRODUCTION xi 

grace," Cowper's old friend said when he saw 
a poor wretch one day in dire trouble ; and 
so I think not seldom when I see such sights, 
and grow pitiful in thanksgiving. It is the 
one word more which may be one too many. 
I have had to rough it, as we say, and to learn 
after all, in other ways, what my old school- 
master failed to teach me, I was siicJi a dunce, 
that some problems must be solved by what 
he called ''the double position, or rule of 
false ; " and what I have learned touching our 
life in its youth and earlier prime, I have tried 
to tell in these Talks to young men — with 
asides to young women. 

New York, Nov. i6, 1887. 



TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 



Ihe 3oy of youth 

Eccles. xi. 7-10 



TT7E may fairly assume that the Preacher 

is thinking of youth as a quality rather 
than a time in our life, in the last part of 
this sad sermon ; and when he has called 
up the memories of his own lost youth, as 
I take it, he draws a picture of his own 
old age, drifting slowly down to death, 
thinks of what he was then, and what he 
is now, and cries, "Rejoice, O young man, 
in thy youth ! " — in the clear glance of 
the eye of it, and the sure tramp of the 
foot, in the healthy sleep which comes 
then, and the cheerful waking, in the 



2 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

unworn power of it, and the steady nerve, 
and in its sunny hopes and expectations. 
Rejoice in thy yoiitli, for the time is com- 
ing to you, which has come to me, when 
your eyes will grow dim, and desire fail ; 
when you will wake up at the twitter of 
the sparrow to long and dreary days, and 
your life will be no longer like an April 
day in which sunshine chases shadow, but 
like the setting-in of winter when the 
clouds return after the rain. 

And I suppose few men have ever lived 
who could say such words as these with a 
deeper insight of their truth than this sad 
old king. His own life opened with as 
fair a promise, and was filled with a joy as 
fine, as ever fell to the lot of a young man 
in any age or country. His father was a 
poet, a warrior, and a king, — a man who 
had struck the harp to deathless numbers, 
touched the national banner with a new 
glory, and given an enduring splendor to 



THE JOY OF YOUTH 3 

the throne. His father's son was the 
darling of the nation, once in the first fair 
prime of his days, with a treasury full of 
gold and silver, with councillors full of wis- 
dom, with a keen and eager heart for what 
we have come to call the true, the beauti- 
ful, and the good ; and with all this, in these 
early times, a simple and humble reliance on 
God, worthy the soul of a saint. 

Well, about forty years pass away, as 
nearly as we can guess ; and then he writes 
this sermon, as the traditions run, one of 
the saddest that ever came out of the 
human heart. His joy has vanished ; knowl- 
edge has eaten the heart out of his faith ; 
and we hear no more of the prayers which 
rise with such an exquisite grace from the 
youth who would always wait on God for 
direction and trust him for wi-sdom. Super- 
stition has set up her idols where religion 
built her altars, and a brooding sadness has 
taken the place of the old strong joy. The 



4 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

judgment of earth and heaven has gone 
against him in these forty years, and he 
knows that better than any other living 
man ; and so he moans, as he opens his 
great sad sermon, ''Vanity of vanities, all 
is vanity." 

But now as he draws to his conclusion, 
he pulls himself together, as we say, and 
says, ^^ No, that is not true: ruined as I 
am, and base, I will not lie to my own 
soul. Some things are not vanity, after all ; 
and one of these is the lost youth I have 
been looking at through the glass of time. 
Vanity has come out of my manhood ; but 
God gave me that youth for as lovely a 
verity as his hand ever made, and I alone 
have to answer for turning the fruit of it 
to ashes on the lips of my old age. I must 
not go back on that fair vision. I cannot 
be such an utter fool as to call white, black. 
I know it was bright and good, and all the 
more I know it when I think of what I 



THE JOY OF YOUTH 5 

was and what I am. That glory on the 
face of Nature then was the true revelation 
of her life : this gray monotony is only her 
shroud. 

"That joy of my youth, in which I went and 
came, slept and woke, planned and wrought, 
and sang out of my heart as a bird sings ; 
the love with which I loved one woman 
for love's sake, saw myself in the eyes of 
her children, made my home beautiful and 
clean, and the power by which I kept 
order to the utmost line of my kingdom, — 
these were all good and true, and will be 
though I should die crying, * There is no 
God.' It is no proof that these gifts were 
not good, because evil has come in their 
wake to one poor old man ; and so the 
youth of the world shall know, from one 
who can tell the story from the heart of 
a sore and sad experience, how the way 
opens here toward glory or shame. There- 
fore, rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, 



o TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

and let thine heart cheer thee in the days 
of thy youth, and walk in the ways of 
thine heart, and the sight of thine eyes ; 
but know thou that for all these things 
God will bring thee into judgment." 

But if the Preacher had said no such 
word as this, of the joy there is in a fresh 
young life clean and pure as his own was 
once, the loss would have only lain in his 
sermon. Because, to rejoice in our youth, 
no matter what we may say who mourn 
after *'the tender light of a day that is 
dead," is as natural as it is for the land to 
rejoice in the May sun, the birds in their 
building and brooding, and all things that 
run and fly in the outbreak of their impris- 
oned instincts when life rises to spring-tide. 

There is a lovely chapter to be read between 
the lines in the early history of New Eng- 
land, of the way the youth there fought for 
its innocent and harmless joy, against the 
stern and austere rule of the elder men and 



THE JOY OF YOUTH 7 

ministers who had come to look on such 
things as quite beneath the heed of immor- 
tal souls that were trying to solve the prob- 
lems of "Providence, foreknowledge, will, and 
fate." The joy will break out all the same, 
into the bloom of a new ribbon or vest ; 
into profane music by and by, and the sing- 
ing of old ballads under the breath ; and 
into stolen walks of a young man and maid 
on a Sunday before sundown, that they may 
tell the old sweet story to each other when 
they ought to be hearing the minister hold- 
ing forth on the wrath of God. In junket- 
ings again as time went on, and even a dance 
at some outlying farm where the farmer and 
his wife of the later emigration held on to 
the cheerful traditions of the old mother- 
land, thought no harm of innocent amuse- 
ments, and so would risk a good deal that 
the young folks might be young. The mas- 
ters of the strongholds of the stern Puri- 
tan spirit could never prevent these outbreaks 



o TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

of the joy of youth, any more than they could 
prevent the purple and gold on the breast 
of the doves, or the song of the birds in 
the elms, or the rush of the spring floods ; 
and for very much the same reason. It was 
spring with those they would affront ; Nature 
was bidding them rejoice in many ways the 
ministers and selectmen could not or would 
not understand: and so it was like trying to 
fight the rainbow. Nor, at a later day, could 
the Society of Friends master these joyous 
instincts and outbreaks, whether they took 
these lighter forms, or the loftier forms of 
poetry and music ; for when Nature says one 
thing and even what we may call Religion 
another, and the law of the church or the 
sect crosses that of "all out doors," you 
need not ponder the question as to which is 
bound to win in the long fight, — the law laid 
down by Calvin, Roger Williams, George 
Fox, or John Wesley, on the one hand, or 
this joy of youth on the other, pulsing 



THE JOY OF YOUTH 9 

through the heart of the new generation. 
Only the immutable can stand, and this 
joy is immutable as the light of heaven ; 
and so those who would fight it in any 
innocent form it may choose to take, have 
first to settle the question whether they are 
not fighting against God. 

I would say, then, it is no use asking 
whether this man was wise, or a fool, for 
obeying this instinct of his youth to rejoice 
in what was within and all about him. His 
joy in books and music, in the making of 
fair gardens, and in collecting rare treasures 
of art ; in his wife and children, his home, 
temple, and government, and in wit and 
humor, — for, Hebrew as he was, he must 
have had some turn that way too, or he 
could never have solved that problem of 
the two mothers, in which one detects a 
grain of both, — these in themselves were 
not the wayward freaks of a young man's 
folly. They were good, true things in their 



lO TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

degree then, as they are now ; not vanities, 
but verities, and not things well used that 
would make a man wish he was dead and 
done with it. They were indeed the very 
same things Sydney Smith, a wiser man than 
Solomon, found among the joys of his youth, 
and good to him still and true when he wrote 
to a friend, " I am seventy-four years old, 
and am, upon the whole, a happy man. I 
have found this an interesting world to live 
in, and am thankful to Providence for my 
lot." A wiser man than Solomon, I say 
again, in despite of the catechism ; for in the 
crucible of the one life you find dust and 
ashes when old age draws on, and in the 
other the fine gold of gratitude and a sweet 
content. 

Now, then, where shall we look for the 
reasons which turned a youth of pure sweet- 
ness to an old age of gall ? and how came 
that which began in hope to end in despair.-^ 

And I answer, in this first of all, that in 



THE JOY OF YOUTH II 

the eager hunger of his youth, and the push- 
ing-out of his genius, he tried to do too 
many things to do any one supremely well ; 
so that, while the idea of the way each one 
ought to be done held itself high and clear 
in his soul, the doing fell so far short of it 
as to leave a sense of failure in the whole 
endeavor. In this so far, however, I think 
he was not to blame ; it is the fault, but not 
the sin, of youth, to be stricken with the 
fever of untried powers, and to feel as I re- 
member I felt when I was let loose for the 
first time to browse in a great library. There 
were so many books I wanted to read, that 
night came on, and I had not read a whole 
chapter in any one of them ; and something 
like this was the trouble with this young man. 
Perhaps he might have sung psalms equal to 
those of his royal father, — he only sang the 
Song of Solomon; or prophesied, — but he only 
preached, and collected proverbs. In some 
one thing, or it may be more than one, he 



12 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

might have flamed out into a supreme excel- 
lence. He flatted out into a few degrees 
above commonplace ; and the best thing he 
has left us — this sad sermon — is, in some 
sense, the worst. It was with him, indeed, 
as some one has said it was with Brougham, 
who also came to something like our Preacher's 
spirit in his old age : '' He could have done 
any one of ten things better than any other 
man in England, but he insisted on doing the 
whole ten." Now, do we wonder over Schaef- 
fer's " Faust and Margaret " ? He wrought 
thirty years of his life into those wonderful 
designs. Or over Mozart's music .'* '' If few 
have equalled me in my art," he said, "fewer 
still have studied it with such untiring zeal." 
And here, to my mind, is one root of this 
young man's trouble. The joy of youth was in 
him, and pricked him on to try this and that ; 
but, king as he was, he could not command the 
perfection his soul called for, because he would 
not pay the price old Carlyle told the young 



THE JOY OF YOUTH I3 

men in Glasgow he had always paid for any 
worthy work he had ever done, — hard, stern 
labor, which had made him actually sick in 
his body, so ruthless was the soul of him to 
do it well. No such ruthlessness touches us 
in this noble young king. It is an amateur 
and dilettante way he has of doing things in 
those days, if the Song of Songs gives us any 
insight of his methods. 

And so it is, that, as we only get out of 
any endeavor a worth in proportion to that 
we put into it, we are not to wonder that he 
should cry at last, '^ What has a man of all 
his labor under the sun } " For this gradual 
selection of some one thing to do and to be 
is pretty sure to lead a young man on to the 
second line this man failed to reach, and, in 
failing there, drifted on to the third and last ; 
and that is the sacredness which invests any 
worthy work in the end, so that this shall 
not be one thing and your religion another ; 
but, as the good Methodist woman said she 



14 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

never missed the corners in sweeping a room 

when she said that Scripture, '' Create in me 

a clean heart, O God ! " so you shall find that 

your work and your religion always meet and 

tie. ** I keep up my heart," Kepler said one 

« 
grim day, "with the thought that I serve 

not the emperor, but the whole human race." 
And I suspect there is some such fine whole- 
ness in whatever we do in this spirit, right 
down to sweeping a room or the streets. 
Wholeness and oneness, each and all, the red- 
cloaked clown and the emperor ; Beethoven, 
in the little church at Godesberg, touching 
the new organ to such a holy (whole) pur- 
pose of a week-day morning, that the peasant 
women could not scrub the floor for delight 
and wonder, and then the better scrubbing 
from the line where they paused to listen to 
the matchless music. 

If this man, then, had caught out of the 
joy of his youth and his unworn powers some 
one thing to do, and had drawn on his whole 



THE JOY OF YOUTH 15 

manhood for the power to do it well, to put 
heart and life into it without stint or stay, 
then heart and life would have come out of 
it, and the thing would have grown sacred, 
so that he could have afforded to look at it 
from the uttermost verge of life with joy. 
He could have felt about it as Wordsworth 
felt about some of his poems when Southey 
said, " If you will alter them in such and such 
a way, you will win both fame and fortune." 
He had neither then ; but he said, " That is 
the true way, and I will die unheard rather 
than alter a word for such a reason." Such 
work, I say, always touches the deep, pure 
springs, whereof if a man drink he shall 
thirst no more, — except to drink at them 
again. Such labor is always prayer, and the 
prayer which does not lead us toward such 
labor fails at last to rise above the roof-tree ; 
and failing here we enter on the course which 
leads from joy to the judgment. 

Because it is clear enough at last where 



l6 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

the rock lay on which this noble and beautiful 
promise of a young man's life was wrecked. 
It lay in doing every thing for enjoyment, and 
nothing for joy, — that curse and bane and 
plague-spot of a young man's life. Still, this 
was what led this king among men, from wor- 
ship to idolatry, from reverence to supersti- 
tion, and from a clean home, in which he 
lived v/ith one woman, his own true wife, to a 
harem ; from love to lust, from power to palsy, 
and from the first heaven to the last hell. 

Joy is of the Spartan stock, — nay, let me 
rather say, of the grandest Christian. There 
is iron in the blood which pulses through 
the heart of joy. It is the sentinel's keeping 
guard in bitter weather, and in a great and 
holy quarrel. It is Andrew Marvel's eating 
mutton-hash, and defying the king to buy 
him up for any dirty purpose. It is Wesley's 
sleeping on bare boards, and thanking God 
he had one whole side to sleep on. It is 
Luther's turninp^ wood for bread, and overturn- 



THE JOY OF YOUTH l? 

ing kingdoms for righteousness. It is theirs 
who search for the truth with the whole heart, 
and then hide it in noble endeavors ; it is in 
the souls of merchants, and clerks, and arti- 
sans, and "daytal men," who will not shirk 
or fawn or lie, and will insist on honest deal- 
ings in what they do. It was not this man's 
way. It is not the way, I fear, in our time, 
of a great many who would like to pass for 
Solomons; but its lines run even with the 
way to the eternal life. Joy lies in chastity, 
and purity, and charity touched with a tender 
concern for those we do not like, and in 
doing for duty what can never be pleasant, 
but must be done. It is in denying myself, 
when myself would deny my manhood ; and 
in bearing my cross, though I have no hope 
of a crown. 

But that a joy like this can rise and ripen 
in our age, out of the joy of youth, without 
faith in God, in the world we live in, and 
the folk we live with, in the worth of our 



l8 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

work, and in prayer for help from on high, 
my own sixty-three years of life deny, no 
matter whether I sit with this sad old king, 
or say with holy Paul, "I have kept the 
faith." How large I should make the inter- 
pretation of these things, I have no time 
to tell you. But as I have seen a spring 
which had cut its way through the very 
granite, and then poured on to all high 
uses, gathering and giving as it made its 
way to the river and the sea ; and then an- 
other spring that only made a marsh about 
its margin, in which things would rot but 
never ripen, — so I can see how men true to 
this truth I have tried to tell, and working 
in this faith, carve out a grand sweet man- 
hood which makes us all their debtors ; or, 
failing in this, spread themselves out in 
dead levels of nothing in particular except 
procuring the means of enjoyment which 
rot the very fibre of their manhood as the 
years pass on, and open the way to a dreary 



THE JOY OF YOUTH IQ 

old age, and the cry, " A man hath no pre- 
eminence over a beast, for all is vanity." 

" Who is my chosen hero ? I have none. 

This young man is enough for me : brave, chaste, 

Faithful to duty, by no vice debased; 
Lord of himself, yet serving every one; 
Fair, with frank eyes and jocund as the sun, 

Smihng from sweet glad lips all amply graced 

With natural persuasion ; pure from waist 
To feet, and shoulder, that no man doth shun — 

Nor woman neither — his compulsive charm ; 

These great, good gifts he ne'er hath used for harm. 
From his strong limbs, true heart, fine-fibred brain, 

Sweetness flows into life like pure fresh air 
From mountains blown over a bed of pain: 

I seek nausfht human loftier, naught more rare." 



II 
iBoblihe Cemptations 

Luke iv. 1-13 

T WENT, when I was in England, to visit 
the ruins of an old castle which was built 
not long after the Conquest, by a man whose 
main business it was to keep the land in 
awe with the strong hand ; and it fitted his 
plan as the hammer fits the hand of a 
smith, stood true to its purpose for some five 
hundred years, and then, when the first long 
chapter of tyrant and slave came to an end 
in England, was tumbled into ruin by Crom- 
well and his men. 

The stronghold stood on a grand lift of 
land, which shoots down on one side to a 
swift-running river; and so it fell out, that 
while the other sides were made strong by 



GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 21 

the art and device of the builders, the 
cliff and the river were considered almost, 
if not quite, impregnable in themselves. 
And there is a tradition, that the place was 
besieged once by a strong force, but was so 
stoutly defended that the man in command 
began to think he would be beaten, and the 
castle remain in the hands which held the bolts 
and bars. 

Still there was one weak side, after all, of 
which those who held the place had no idea, 
and it was that they had always considered 
impregnable. Some mere curtain of a wall 
had been built there, to be sure, but the 
splendid lift was in itself the true defence, 
they said ; and so they kept slack watch 
and ward toward the river, and turned their 
attention to the side next the town. Then 
one day a man came to the captain of the 
enemy's host, and said, " I can clirnb that 
cliff, and if you will give me so many 
picked men I will take the place. " And it 



22 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

was so. One wild, dark night, they climbed 
the great cliff, found room to muster for 
the rush, and in the morning the place was 
in the enemy's hands; and so the high and 
strong side proved to be the ruin of those 
who were set to defend the fortress. 

So ran the story I used to hear in my boy- 
hood, as we sat by the winter fire far away. 
And now in my later manhood I find it 
comes back to me as a kind of parable 
which points toward this truth : That the 
imperative need in young men of the finest 
promise — yes, and in some old men too, 
who seem to have made their early promise 
good — is not to set all the sentinels on the 
meaner and lower side of our nature, and 
none on the nobler and higher ; because this 
may be our danger as it was theirs who were 
set to keep the old fortress, that the foe 
may take us also on this high and strong 
side. 

And we cannot have seen much of life if 



GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 23 

we have not found painful proof of this truth. 
I would like to open to you, at some cost of 
iteration, that the higher and stronger side 
of our nature may still be the weaker, simply 
because there is no need, as we imagine, to 
explore that thoroughly, and set due watch 
and ward. We think it is secure from assault, 
and stands quite impregnable by reason of its 
own uplifting; while ''^e truth is, as our wise 
friend says in ''A xviodern Instance," that "the 
Devil always takes a man on the very high- 
est plane." I have myself seen many men 
in my life who were led into temptation first, 
and then on to wreck and ruin, who could 
never have come to such grief in a mean and 
paltry way. It was the old story of the Fall, 
v.'hich still holds such deep meanings for us 
when we think we have blown it down the 
wind by a breath of criticism. They would 
eat of the tree of the knowledge of good 
and evil, and become as gods. Or, some gen- 
erous impulse was made the point of attack, 



24 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

or their love for beauty and grace and the joy 
of youth, or even their sympathy with suffering 
and sorrow. The hook that caught them was 
baited with something or the semblance of 
something very noble and good. Play was 
made for them Vv^ith splendid and taking illu- 
sions, there was no other way to come at 
them ; but all the same they were led captive 
by the Devil at his will at last, or had I not 
better say the evil at its will ? 

I remember many years ago, when I was 
settled in Chicago, noticing a young man sit- 
ting near my pulpit one Sunday, who caught 
more of my attention than was good for the 
congregation, with his great dreamy eyes, 
which were watching me intently, and his face 
of the most singular beauty and grace. He 
came again, and often, so we became some- 
what intimate in the course of time ; and I 
do not know that I ever met a man of a 
more delicate and gifted spirit. But I found 
before very long that he was in the toils of 



GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 25 

a terrible curse ; and in talking with him, I 
found the evil thing had come in on this 
nobler side of his nature. He had taken 
opium once, in the eager longing to find 
whether there was indeed any such enchant- 
ment in the drug as he had been reading 
about in De Quincey's wonderful essay, and 
fearing no evil, but feeling sure that he should 
be able to hold his own, come out all right 
at last, and be able to read us some new 
lesson of the good and evil of the drug. 
Well, the experience was so full of wonder 
to him, and sent such magic flying through 
his fine brain, that he felt he must return to 
it once more, and still again ; and so when 
I found him he was the slave of that on 
which he had looked down from his high 
place as a master, and now he was trying 
with all his might to drive the enemy out of 
the fortress, and be free. And there was not 
a man of us who came to know and love him, 
who would not have done any thing a man 



26 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

may do for his rescue ; but when he thought, 
and we all thought, the worst was over, and 
the fine manhood would bloom out again, it 
was found that the curse had blasted the very 
roots of his young life together with the blos- 
som ; and so he had to die that he might be 
free from the body of this death. 

Now, I say, it was no base and mean long- 
ing which caught this splendid young fellow, 
when he began to go on the way that leads 
down to death. The tempter came in through 
the desire to know more about this wonder 
he had heard of, and make his report. There 
stood the tree, — shall I say, of the knowledge 
of good and evil.-* — and here was the warn- 
ing, '* Of this tree thou shalt not eat, for in 
the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely 
die ; " and here was the tempter to whisper, 
"You shall not surely die, not surely; you 
shall be as the gods, knowing good from 
evil ; " and then the day came when he had 
to die, that he might be free from the curse. 



GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS '2'7 

So this is one form of these godHke tempta- 
tions. No need to guard that side of our 
Hfe, we say ; it will take care of itself. We 
can stand there on our high place, and laugh 
at the enemy. We must watch our weakness, 
and we wist not this is our weakness, though 
it seems to touch the very fringes of heaven. 
So it has fallen out often in the history of 
the nations, that some man has held his own 
nobly, and grown to be an accepted leader 
of men ; and then some day we find he has 
fallen suddenly and quite wofully, — " given 
uimself away," as we say, — and made ship- 
wreck of his career ; like Webster, as so many 
say, trying to find his way into the White 
House. But I do not believe you at all 
when you credit an essentially noble man 
with low and mean motives, and these only 
for doing what we may all deplore. You 
say,— 

"Just for a handful of sih-er he left us, 
Just for a medal to stick on his coat." 



28 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

I say, the chances are, the man was not 
taken captive in that poor, base way at all ; 
it was a godlike temptation. The whisper to 
him would be, " Think how much good you 
may do if you can win that prize ; what a 
blessing you may be to your nation and the 
world ; how you may lead in noble policies, 
make your country radiant and strong, and 
die with the tears of the people raining down 
about your bed." It is no mean ambition in 
such men merely to get the place, while in 
some others it may be nothing else. It is 
on the side where the river of the water of 
life runs deep and strong, and the great 
uplifting is, that the enemy gets in.' They 
would have said, ** Is thy servant a dog, that 
he should do this thing ? " had the temptation 
come where they had kept the guard strong 
all their life. 

I think of this again when I read the great, 
sad story of Robert Burns. The temptations 
that scourged him while he lived, made death 



GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 29 

dark to him, and ruined all that could be 
ruined of his matchless genius, crept in and 
caught him on the high and noble side of his 
nature. To be a cold and calculating villain 
in his conduct toward women, to die of the 
drink when he was still in his prime, and 
leave a widow, with her little children, to 
the cold charities of the world, and to write 
things that cripple his beautiful genius down 
to the cloven foot, — this is no way to frame 
your verdict of Robert Burns. The sin and 
shame crept in, again I say, on the nobler 
side, and he was as far from a base and mean 
intention as the pit is from the nadir. His 
love of beauty and grace, yes, and his love 
of purity, the glamour which comes to such 
a nature from wine and strong drink, and 
the fine humors of what so many call good 
company, the flash and flame of wit, and the 
stormy splendors of youth at springtide, — 
these were the lures and wiles which caught 
his noble spirit and led it captive. Rober'^ 



30 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

Burns hated hypocrisy and meanness, and the 
shams and shames he saw all about him, and 
loved the bright, brave world he saw now 
and then, and true men and women, and all 
the pleasantness he could compass in that 
haggard time and place ; and these were the 
baits that caught him. The way to sin and 
shame for him, and the woe of it, and the 
slaying when the enemy had made good his 
footing, lay through sympathies and Ukings 
which were, one may say, the very conditions 
of being the m.an he was, apart from the 
curse. 

I had another and a very dear friend in 
those old times I was looking at just now, a 
high-minded man, and within his limitations 
very wise ; while he was also one of the most 
useful men I have ever known, full of public 
spirit, and one who was always to be de- 
pended on to see a good thing through ; gen- 
erous with his money, and generous with his 
power. 



GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 31 

But the tempter whispered, *' You are too 
good for all that plodding you have to do ; 
why not put your fine powers to finer uses, 
build up your fortune faster, and take a first 
place ? " It seems to me now, there was no 
danger at all, had he kept watch and ward on 
the nobler and most generous side of his 
nature. Try to come at him then with a 
proposition which would leave a stain on him, 
it would have been as if you should throv/ 
slime at the morning star. But he launched 
out into large adventures that were full of 
peril. Some years passed ; a panic came, and 
then the high and beautiful life was taken 
by a swift stroke ; ruin came, death followed, 
and that was left to be explained for which 
there is no explanation. His life was like a 
psalm when I knew him at his best : it 
passed down to a dirge. He had not kept 
true guard over the towering ambition, and so 
the stronger proved to be again the weaker 
side. 



32 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

I had in my church in those days also 
another young man, fresh from a great uni- 
versity. He came to our city, a strong man 
armed ; and there could be no doubt but 
that he would take a first place in the work 
he had to do. And where would you find 
such a rare wit beside, or gleaming humor, 
or instincts of a finer grain ? No danger on 
the mean side, no place for the Devil there : 
he knew what it was to be a gentleman, and 
an American gentleman at that, the finest 
type of gentlehood I know of on the earth. 
But he has been dead these many years 
now, and his death was the back stroke of 
despair that he should ever be able to master 
the foe that had come in on the nobler side. 
There was no other sin or shame, only the 
drink ; but he could not live on those terms, 
and so, it seemed to him, there was no way 
open but to die. 

Here, then, is the truth as it opens to my 
mind, of these godlike temptations ; and it 



GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 33 

brings me to ask the question I have answered 
in part before the asking, What is to be done 
about this peril as it touches your life and 
mine ? 

This, first of all, I tried to make clear in 
touching the joy of youth. It is no bane, 
but a very choice blessing, that we should be 
endowed with a bright and joyous nature, 
and love this world and our life when there 
is nothing mean in it, or low. So if the 
love for beauty and grace entrances you 
wherever you turn, you are not to crush this 
love out or despise it ; but to make duty, 
and a steady watch and ward over such a 
love, also beautiful and gracious. 

Are you full of a fine ambition ? you must 
take this truth home, that the strong side of 
ambition, if we do not keep a good lookout, 
may become the weak side of a fair and true 
manhood. Are your passions and appetites 
keen and ardent ? you must not look down on 
them with disgust, but hide enough of the 



34 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

iron of high principle in them, and the fire 
of a sacred honor, to make their true use 
and purpose immutable as heaven. Let not 
that noble vessel of which you are captain 
now, shape her course until you are as sure 
as you can be, with this mystery of evil 
to fight by God's help, that the cargo will 
not shift in any storm, or you go to sleep 
when you should be on deck manning her 
with your choicest manhood. The fortrepj is 
in your hands, if I may return to my good old 
figure, but there is the enemy watching his 
chance ; and I shall believe you will guard the 
mean side well, but your weakness may lie in 
the feeling of your strength. You must call 
on God to help you, and keep strong guard 
on the nobler side as you do on the meaner. 
"The sin that doth so easily beset us" may 
be that we look down on with scorn and 
contempt, while as yet the untried way lies 
before us. 



Ill 
Tfly ISfeui Kame 

Rev. ui. 12 

T FIND food for meditation now and then, 
as I read my Bible, in tracing the close 
kinship between the name and the nature 
of the person to whom it is given, and in 
noticing how often the name is a patent of 
nobility or a brand of infamy, given, as one 
guesses, Indian fashion, when the man or 
woman had revealed their ingrain quality in 
their life. 

You find when you use this key that Adam 
is ** earthy," but Eve is a ''quickening unto 
life ; " and then you remember that this is 
a parable of names which still holds a mean- 
ing, in the mining-camps for instance, where 
the man is so often of the earth earthy, 

35 



36 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

until the woman comes to quicken his nobler 
nature through her own, and make good the 
sanctities of a home, a church, and a school. 
Enoch, again, is ''dedicated," walking with 
God; and Noah is "consolation," I suppose 
because he built that bridge between the 
despair of the old world and the hope of 
the new. Abram is "the father of eleva- 
tion " when he breaks away from the old 
idolatries, and worships the unseen and eter- 
nal God ; and then when he reveals that 
Vvonderful staying power, reason or none, 
and believes things are going all right when 
to his poor mortal sense it must have seemed 
they were going all wrong, he becomes 
Abraham "the faithful" and "the father of 
the faithful." 

Artemas, Paul's good friend, is "whole" 
or sound, again, or what we would call a 
whole man; and Martha is "tart" or bitter. 
Samuel is "heard of God," and some say 
Samson is "sunlike" or "strong." But Deli- 



MY NEW NAME 37 

lah, who did so much to wreck his fair 
youth and manhood, has a very suggestive 
name indeed : if I have caught the true 
meaning, she is simply a ** head of hair." 
And there be many Delilahs. 

This is a hint, and no more, of what the 
names mean we pass over in our reading as 
if they meant no more than those that 
catch our eye in a directory, and not so 
much as the Rose, Prudence, Grace, and 
Joy of my own early days. In the Old 
Testament they seem always to stand for 
what is most notable and essential in the 
man or woman ; while in the New Testa- 
ment you can still trace the coincidence, 
in many cases, between the person and 
the quality, and have to believe that a 
new name was still given to the man when 
his nature fairly opened out, and he became 
the incarnation of the special power or qual- 
ity he flashed into bold relief as he passed 
between the eternities. 



38 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

And you can see, again, what worth there 
was in this instinct for the true name, when 
you remember that the principle is as true 
now as it ever was, and may find as fine a fit- 
ness in you or me, it may be, to-day, as that 
which belongs to Job " the weeper," or Luke 
the "luminous." So the name they gave me 
when they knew no more what my life would 
be, than I did, may touch such noble and 
beautiful meanings that it shall seem like a 
prophecy as that of John Greenleaf does in 
our sweet singer ; while there is a chance, 
on the other hand, that my name may be a 
satire as bitter as if a mother of wolves should 
call one of her breed a lamb. My real 
name is that they write in the books which 
are kept where nothing enters that maketh 
a lie. It is the name I earn, be it a brand 
of shame, or a title to which that of princes 
or nobles is a mockery ; and I wait for this 
real, this new name, until I have made my 
stroke or indeed until I have lived my life as 



MY NEW NAME 39 

Shakespeare did, and Cromwell and Milton, 
and then it is that baptism for the dead 
against which there is no appeal, and for 
which there is no legislation. We say of 
a man sometimes, he has made a name. It 
is the truth about every man ; and it would 
be as easy to change the name of a nation, 
or shall I not say of God, as this I win 
when I have fairly lived my life. And it 
depends in no wise on the whim or fancy 
of those about us. It is the signature and 
seal of those above us, and touches a law 
like that through which iron can never be 
branded as silk, or round shot for wheat. 
'* Thou, for I know not now thy name in 
heaven," the poet cries ; but it must have 
been that he wist not of this law. When 
we had to give our beloved back again 
to God, who had always lived so close to 
heaven, passing through all peril like a beam 
from the sun, and loving and gentle as the 
angels, I knew what the new name was she 



40 TALKS TO YOUNG AA E N 

had won in the years she was with us : it 
was Grace. 

And in speaking to you of this thought in 
its wider reaches, I want you to notice first 
how true this truth of the new name is to 
the common levels of our life, and the sim- 
plest things we can do. You shall go into 
a hundred homes, for instance, and wherever 
you go you can read the new name of those 
who have made the home, or are newly set- 
ting out to make it. It will be beauty or 
deformity, simplicity or pretension, cleanness 
or squalor, order or tumult, sunshine or gloom. 
You cannot help your judgment, I cannot help 
mine. The inmates are revealing their inner 
life to us. The home was in them before 
they came to live there, and is the reflection 
of their nature, as surely as the lovely nest of 
the Baltimore oriole, or the paltry perversion 
of the daw. One of my little maids, many 
years ago, was greatly taken by a book, 
*' How to Live and Make your Home Beau- 



MY NEW NAME 4I 

tiful on Six Hundred Dollars a Year," but 
got sadly puzzled over a story the writer told 
of the way she had sawed up the finial of an 
old pump she had bought for a few cents, 
into pretty brackets for her parlor. The wise 
Uttle creature thought this was the weak 
place in the book ; because, as she said, you 
could not be sure of finding the top of an 
old pump going for a few cents at an auc- 
tion, and then where would you be ? But I 
said, " My child, you will find, when you get 
a home, that this will not depend on the old 
pump, but on yourself. If you are bound to 
have the brackets for your five or ten cents, 
you will get them somehow, never fear." 

Or, it may be, you will break bread some- 
where, and the new name will be known to 
you, or yours to those who come to your 
home in the breaking of bread. Is it such 
bread as never should be eaten ? and does 
the young house-mother blame the poor maid 
in the kitchen ? It may happen so once and 



42 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

again, but as a rule we can trust all the 
bread is made by the house-mother, though 
she mxay not touch it ; and if there is death 
in the pot, the blame must be laid at her 
door. Is it such bread, again, as the angels 
are reported to have baken for the prophet, 
on the strength of which he went forty days ? 
Then the good wife is herself the bread of 
life. It is not in the wheat, or the leaven, 
or the oven, you find the true secret of this 
wholesome worth : it is in the housewife, the 
fair flower of all civility. .They know noth- 
ing of such bread among the squaws. The 
Indian woman on Grand Traverse offered me 
a cake once when I was out fishing ; but I 
had seen her make it, and said, "No, thank 
you ; I am not hungry just now." 

Or, if I build a house to my mind, there 
is my name on the house for all men to see, 
and in the pictures on the walls, and the 
books in the case, in the bits of blended 
color, and in the very atmosphere men and 



MY NEW NAME 43 

women are aware of when they sit down 
with me in my living-room or my den. A 
man built a house in Chicago very soon after 
the fire ; and another man, coming to the 
city, asked a friend where he lived. " I am 
going that way," was the answer, ''and I 
will show you." — "Please do not do that," 
the stranger said again; ''show me the street, 
and let me see if I cannot pick out the 
house myself." So they walked up the street 
in which, by that time, there might be a 
score of houses ; and the moment he saw one 
of them he said, "That's the house," and he 
was right. He saw the builder's mind and 
heart in the building, and read the new name. 
I notice how true this is, again, of our 
wider life, and how the new name comes out 
high and clear at last, as if the letters were 
braided of stars, or were burnt in by infernal 
fires, and there is no escape. If meanness 
and self-seeking, and shirking my duty, is the 
part I play, while I would still win a good 



44 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

name, the one man in all the world I have 
to fear is myself. This autograph cannot 
pass the inner room ; the subtile and delicate 
water-mark is in the substance of my life. 
But if your new name or mine, on the other 
hand, is to be one of a proud and sweet dis- 
tinction, and there are those who would fain 
make the true m.an a liar, or the clean man 
a knave, and set the upright man crawling, 
by their say-so, then we are not to heed 
their darts and stings beyond the pain of 
this present day ; the soul of honesty and 
truth in us stands scatheless and safe from 
the dart. " I have invented a bullet-proof 
coat, my lord," the man said to Wellington. 
" Quite sure of that } " the veteran asked. 
*' Quite sure," was the answer. ''Then put 
it on," was the final word, " and we will see. 
— Colonel, call in the riflemen, and let them 
fire at the bullet-proof coat." But then the 
man begged for grace, and went away. My 
new name, if I am the man I should be, is 



MYNEWNAME 45 

just that armor of proof. No use trying to 
pierce it with any dart hell ever forged. 
Nothing can be more sure than the provi- 
dence which guards the good new name. 
Evil or envious men would have defiled 
Washington's : they could as easily have defiled 
the morning star. Had there been any claws 
on the seeds of slander that were sown so 
thick about Lincoln, some would have held 
their own, and overgrown the fair true record. 
The whole world inshrines our ''faithful fath- 
er " in its heart. Luther, Milton, Cromwell, 
— if we had lived when slanders were fly- 
ing all about them like dead carrion, the best 
of us might have been tempted to wonder 
whether there might not be something in 
them after all, and to say, ** There must be 
some fire in there, else how could there be 
such a smoke and stench.?" But while the 
lying spirits were forging evil names for them, 
they were writing their own far up in the 
heavens, the good new names that can never 



46 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

die and never change ; and now these abide, 
you see, when the rest are like names writ 
in water or on the blowing sand. 

But others again, like Bacon, mingled mean- 
ness with their greatness ; and as the ages 
roll on, the instinct which would fain bury 
what is base touches them, and, where burial 
is not possible, tries the white quicklime. It 
is no use. We might as well try to white- 
wash the black river in the Mamriioth Cave. 
Such men have engraven their name. This 
was noble in them, we say, but that was 
base ; the head was gold, but the feet were 
clay; the judgment has gone beyond us. The 
record is like the footprints of the human or 
hardly human creature I saw in Kansas once, 
on the blue limestone hard now as flint. 
The thing had stood there for an instant 
once, and then gone its way, — Darwin's miss- 
ing link, if one might judge; and there was 
the proof after untold millenniums, the mark 
of the mingled man and beast. 



MYNEWNAME 47 

I notice, once more, that we may be all 
the time getting ready to write this new 
name, or to empower the eternal watchers 
to write it in some supreme moment ; and 
then there is the seal of our greatness, or 
the brand of our meanness, so long as our 
name endures, Jesus said, " Be ye ready, 
for in such an hour as ye think not the 
Son of man cometh." And some will tell 
you he means, you shall be ready to die ; 
but I think he means rather that you shall 
be ready to live, to compact your life, if it 
must be so, into one grand stroke, and so 
win at once and forever the good new name. 
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the 
grand ordeal comes in a great steamer on fire 
far out at sea, or with her side torn open by 
some foul blow; and then ''dastard," "cow- 
ard," "brute," are branded forever on the 
men on one side, and " hero," " saint, " son 
of God," are v/ritten on the foreheads of 
those on the other. Their names go out into 



4^ TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

all the earth as the synonymes of baseness 
or nobility, — the cowards saving a life which 
was proven by their deed to be not worth 
saving-, deaf to the cries of women and little 
children ; ' the heroes, steadfast as Milton's 
angels, tossing all their own chances aside, 
fronting death with steady eyes, dying, and 
leaving us to cry proudly through our tears, 
** He saved others, himself he zvoiild not 
save." 

Ah ! I am glad after all to be a man when 
I read such a record. It is these heroes, and 
not the cowards, these noble, and not the 
base, that hurl the grand defiance in the 
teeth of death, and say, " You can do nothing 
to me." These make me proud of my human 
kind. These are my proofs of the immortal 
soul and the blessed heaven. Set your ma- 
chines going to grind out poorer proof, meta- 
physic, theologic : I do not care for them one 
pin's head in comparison with the proof such 

' Written after a wreck in which all this came to pass. 



MYNEWNAME 49 

men can give me. So the new name may be 
written at once and forever by one grand 
stroke. Yet we may spend a whole lifetime 
getting ready to make that stroke ; and no 
man knoweth the day or the hour when the 
cry will come, and the demand be made to 
reveal in that stroke the hidden soul of me, 
— to write my new name. 

So it is all true, once more, you will find 
in honest old Bunyan, — all true about Obsti- 
nate and Pliable, Christian and Hopeful, Mr. 
Worldly Wiseman who dwells in the town 
of Carnal Policy, and Faithful who goes 
through the fire. All true about old Ready- 
to-Halt, who hobbles toward the eternal life 
on crutches, but gets there all the same ; and 
Great-Heart, who marches with the step you 
can still detect in the good soldier in the citi- 
zen's garb when you see him on Broadway ; 
Inconsiderate, Old Honest, poor Mr. Fearing 
who still could fight at a pinch, Dare-not-Lie, 
Penitent, and all the rest. The fine old 



50 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

dreamer has only done in the semblance of 
his dream what we all do waking, — taken 
out the given name, and put in the new name 
so that we can all see ourselves in his glass. 
He knew all these people down Bedford way, 
and was watching them through the grime 
when he went a-tinkering through thorpe and 
town. It was no mere twist of the Puritan 
mind : this the man hid in his immortal pic- 
ture is the living truth ; and matchless as he 
is in his way, he gives us only one chapter 
in the wonderful dictionary of the new names. 
You will reveal them in the homes you create, 
as I have said, in the work you do, in the 
social life you help to maintain, in the 
churches you uphold, and the schools and 
libraries, and as citizens of the State and 
the Republic. The whole wealth or the 
whole destitution of my life, soon or late, 
goes into my new name. 

And this is my last word, that no young 
man who hears me need die having missed 



MY NEW NAME 5^ 

the good new name. Have you been false ? 
You can be true. Or heedless, hearing only 
and not doing } You can give diligence to 
make your calling and election sure. Have 
you gone back on the good name they gave 
you in your baptism } You can find courage 
in God, as old Cranmer did when he held 
the hand that had signed away his manhood 
in the fire, and said, '' Burn thou first ! " 
The first faint sketch we make may be sad 
as the "Miserere" they used to carve some- 
times for an epitaph, — just that, and no 
more. Yet that word may be so re-written 
that men shall be proud and tender over it 
to tears. 

Or, you may be trying to win the new 
name, and it may seem to be of no use. 
The loose livers and loose thinkers may ap- 
pear to be having the good times, and as 
good a name, withal, as a man need care for. 
Nourish no such distrust in the eternal Prov- 
idence. Men have what they live for, and 



52 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

the pure in heart see God. Let us be true 
to ourselves, and to him and his Christ, and 
then the new name shall be written on thy 
door-post and lintel, ay, and on thy fore- 
head. Tell the truth at all costs, call things 
by their right names, stand in the vanguard ; 
lead, if it is laid upon you, the forlorn hope : 
so shall you be — 

"Worthy the envied boon 
That waits the good and the sincere ; 
Those who have struggled, and with resolute will 
Vanquished earth's pride and meanness, and have shone 
The day-stars of their age." 



IV 

In the Spirit 

Rev. i. 10 

T SUPPOSE we all know what it is to be 
in the spirit on a week-day, ■ — the spirit of 
the time and place. I go into my study, and 
become absorbed in a book. The author may 
be dead and gone this thousand years, and 
no other trace of him remain on the earth ; 
but if he has hidden his spirit in that book, 
and I can find it, he opens his heart to me, 
and I open mine to him, and find myself 
touched as he was touched when he wrote 
that chapter. I cannot help the tears in my 
eyes as I read, any more than he could help 
them when he wrote, or the strong throb of 
the heart, or the ripple of laughter. I see 
what he saw in human homes and human 

53 



54 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

lives, catch the vision he had of the open 
heavens, or the lurid flame and smoke. I am 
in the spirit of this master of my morning, 
and his spirit is in me ; my senses are simply 
the messengers between his soul and mine. 
I seem to hear the voice when I read, they 
used to hear who knew the writer. There is 
a spell on me which makes time and place 
of no account, and I wonder how my morn- 
ing has slipped away. 

Or, I leave my study, and go down into the 
city ; and if it is a busy time, it makes no 
great matter where I go, I find those I seek in 
the spirit of their week-day, so I have to tell 
my story promptly, and go about my business. 
If I should try to ''make a few remarks " on 
a Wednesday, my friend might hear with a 
touch of grace on a Sunday, he would listen 
with a patience born of respect to the min- 
ister, it may be, or his office ; but he would 
be glad when it was over, so that he could 
buckle down again to his worl^. Now, this 



IN THE SPIRIT 55 

spirit is as true to the time and place as 
that was by which I was absorbed in my 
book. Business, you say, is business, and that 
is what you are there for. Not to be in the 
spirit, is to fail in your task ; and to have 
people lounge about and get in your way dur- 
ing the hours when business is done in our 
stores and offices, is an insult and hinderance 
to the genius of the day. 

Because time then is not only money, as 
you say, but more. It is that precious com- 
modity of which money is only one result. 
It is the opportunity for doing the thing God 
has given us to do there and then ; and we 
are there to do something as sacred and 
supreme in those hours and in its own degree 
as worship is, and must not be hindered. I 
have heard that when Master Howe, the in- 
ventor of the sewing-machine, left his busi- 
ness to serve in the war, and was hard at 
work one day for his regiment, a minister 
came to see him, and wanted to take his time 



56 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

in hearing all about a church he wanted to 
build to St. Peter. " No time at all to hear 
about St. Peter," the busy man answered, 
" mind too full of saltpetre ; but hold on a 
moment. Was not St. Peter the only fighter 
among the apostles, the man who drew his 
sword and cut off some one's ear .^ I like 
him, so here's some money for his church. 
Take it, and please go right away." That 
was the true spirit of the time, and so it is 
always. If my friend is the man I am think- 
ing about, doing good and essential work, I 
see no reason why I should say he is not 
in the spirit when he guides the springs of 
industries that move a thousand hands, as 
surely as the minister is who preaches a 
sermon or pours out a prayer which touches 
the springs of thought and emotion in a 
thousand hearts. 

To be in the spirit, then, in the simplest 
sense, week-day or Sunday, is no mystery we 
cannot fathom. It is as real and true a 



IN THE SPIRIT 57 

thing as to be alive, and is, indeed, neither 
more nor less than becoming intensely alive 
to the meaning and purpose of the day. 
We all remember times when we have gone 
to our work all out of tune, and unable to 
fix the mind on what we had to do, half 
dead, as it were, to the demand ; to find, as 
the time went on, that things were slipping 
through our hands to no sort of purpose ; and 
when night came we had to say sadly, with 
the emperor, "I have lost a day." We have 
lost the day, because we have not caught its 
spirit. But on another day we have found 
we were so clear of head and sure of hand 
that we have done the work of two men, and 
come out all aglow with the spirit which 
has borne us as on the wings of eagles. 
Leave this absorbing and inspiring spirit out 
of the account, then, and you are powerless 
to do any thing supremely well. You drift 
with the tide, you fall behind in the race. 
You are like the clock which always loses 



58 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

time, and would have to give up if you had 
no hope that the old fervor would come back 
again, and make the spirit equal to the day. 

Nor can we help seeing, again, that the 
best work we ever do has this quality in it 
above all others. It is done in the spirit, of 
fails of its finest secret. From nursing a 
little child to fighting a battle, from forging 
a bolt to painting a picture, from working 
in a saw-mill to singing in ''The Messiah," we 
must have this essence and spirit of all well 
doing, or else we never do well. If I am an 
employer, I bear with my workman as long 
as I can, if he is no good, as we say, because 
I think he may come round, and catch the 
spirit of his task. But if I find, after all 
my waiting, the hand is there, but not the 
spirit, I have to let him go, because to have 
such a man in my place is like having a bad 
wheel in a machine ; and so able employers 
propose to keep those men at last, and those 
alone, who are in some fair measure one with 



rN THE SPIRIT 59 

them in the spirit of their work. And no 
doubt this is true, again : that when you have 
made a fair allowance for the native ability 
of the young men who begin at the foot of 
the ladder, and climb to the top, you will 
find they are the men who have an absorb- 
ing interest in the concern, and are watch- 
ful and careful, and able to say honestly, 
"I and my employer are one." This, as a 
rule we can trust, is the story of the young 
man who begins with no advantage in posi- 
tion or patronage, and makes his way to the 
highest place. He is in the spirit of his work, 
and gives his heart to it, not half the time 
but all the time, not grudgingly but gladly, 
and not merely for the sake of the salary 
any more than your good doctor helps us in 
our hurts for the sake of the fee, but because 
he loves to do that better tha.n any thing 
else in the world, and makes his work greatly 
its own reward. 

And such success is not to be wondered 



6o TALKS TO ^'OUNG MEN 

at, again, when we think for a moment what 
it ivS such a young man has done. His shop- 
mates or fellow-clerks will say he has a genius 
for what he takes in hand, and this may be 
true ; but then, does not a genius for any 
thing depend greatly on our absorbing love 
for it, and the power of intense application, 
through which every other power is set to 
its finest edge, and directed to the one pur- 
pose the man has in his heart and brain ? I 
imagine that what we call genius is very 
often something like our power of lifting, — a 
common endowment at the start, but capa- 
ble of such a growth, by diligent striving, in 
a healthy man, that it shall become a won- 
der. So genius of any sort lies less in the 
original endowment, and more in the power 
to work steadily in the spirit of what we 
have to do and zvmit to do, than we are 
ready to admit, who go to work with half a 
heart. Native endowment is like iron in the 
ore ; genius is the iron forged to fine shapes 



IN THE SPIRIT 6l 

and polished and tempered for all noble uses. 
Genius latent or asleep is like the gold-dust 
and scales of gold they wash in the moun- 
tains ; but it passes through this spirit, is 
fused and refined, and then is wrought into 
forms which add an almost priceless value to 
the mere weight of worth, such as you find 
in a vase by Cellini. Genius is the gift of 
God, and then it is our intense and absorb- 
ing purpose to make the very best of the 
gift, the perpetual fidelity to Paul's great 
word, " This one thing I do," and to the 
greater word of Jesus, " My Father worketh 
hitherto, and I work." 

And if you want more proof of the truth, 
I would tell you, it can easily be found in the 
life of those who win the highest honors, and 
in noticing how they win them. Your great 
actor, for instance, is always the man who 
enters most thoroughly into the spirit of his 
play, penetrates it with the fire and tears of 
his own nature, and so sw^ays his audience 



62 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

this way and that, as the trees on the up- 
lands are swayed by the wind. When you 
follow an actor, therefore, and say how well 
he plays, I think he does not play well, or 
you would not say so. I saw Ristori once in 
'' Macbeth," with the veil down no art can 
lift for those who are not born into our 
English tongue ; but when she came, moaning 
of her doom, in her sleep, and wringing her 
hands, it was not acting to me, it was the 
hapless woman herself, — the terrible thing 
James thought of when he said, " Sin, when 
it is finished, bringeth forth death." Ristori 
was in the spirit. 

One man comes to our city we are always 
glad to see and hear. His play is as poor a 
thing as can well be imagined, and goes in 
the teeth of the nobler instincts in us all, in 
the favor it shows to a very worthless ne'er- 
do-weel, by comparison with his poor, striving 
wife, so that I always begin by taking the 
woman's part, and say she serves him right 



IN THE SPIRIT 63 

when she drives him to the hills. And there 
are other faults in the play, very grave faults 
indeed, especially in the glamour it casts 
over the curse of strong drink in the hands of 
a weak man. But we forget all this in the 
wonderful witchery of the artist, and weep and 
laugh at his bidding. The touch of nature 
makes us all of kin, and wins our forgiveness, 
or, shall I say, steals away the heart, so that 
we have nothing to forgive. How is this done ? 
I will tell you how I think it is done. The 
man has made this drama the subject of his 
intensest thought and care, he has felt his way 
past the letter into the spirit, and is so 
absorbed, so lost in it, that from the moment 
he appears, with the children hanging about 
him, he does not assume a character, he is 
just Rip himself. And I have been told, that, 
while he is subject to an affliction he cannot 
master when he is himself, as we s-ay, when he 
is in the spirit of his own wonderful creation 
it never troubles him at all. 



64 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

And so it was, again, with Miss Cushman. 
She clung to her work in the last years 
of her life, a dear friend told me, who knew 
her very well, because it was her one refuge 
from perpetual pain. When she was once in 
the spirit of her noble creations, she was free 
from her great, sad burden. So it is also 
with the advocate who makes his client's 
cause his own, and feels the case is worthy 
of the best he can do. He sways the jury 
then, and wins the day against the man who 
cannot for the life of him enter into the 
spirit of the case. An old friend of mine,* 
who used to ride circuit with Mr. Lincoln in 
the West at an early day, told me how he 
always knew when Lincoln was bound to win 
his cause. He had first to feel sure he was 
right, and then the sense of justice and truth 
grew so strong in him, and so absorbed all 
his powers, that his words were like a ham- 
mer and a fire. 

* Hon. Ebenezer Peck. 



IN THE SPIRIT 65 

So no man can ever preach to any purpose 
who is not taken up in the spirit of the truth 
he has to tell. Take that element out of his 
work, and the sermon may.be as fine as 
hands can make it, yet the very deacons will 
go to sleep under that sermon. But let him be 
in the spirit, and then, though the discourse 
may seem to be as dry as Aaron's rod before 
it budded, there will come a time when this 
that moves him shall carry all before it, like 
the rushing of a mighty wind. There is a 
story of a sermon Jonathan Edwards preached 
once in New England, from the text, " Your 
feet shall slide in due time ; " and the people 
settled down comfortably to listen or sleep 
as the spirit moved them. And why not to 
sleep ? For the preacher hardly raises his 
voice above the merest monotone, and the 
sermon is written and read. But the man 
swayed them so, and stormed them, as he 
went on in his discourse, and painted picture 
after picture of the impending doom, so fear- 



66 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

fill, that we are told many in the congrega- 
tion clung to the pillars of the meeting-house 
in solid affright, so terrible was the chasm 
that seemed to open before their very eyes. 
The earth was shuddering under them, and 
the level fioor sloping down toward the eter- 
nal fires. The word had grown to this 
through years of brooding. A misconception, 
you say, a monstrous birth. Yes, so I be- 
lieve ; but, all the same, fearfully true to the 
preacher, and, by consequence, fearfully true 
to his hearers. Jonathan Edwards was in the 
spirit. And so you may set this truth in 
whatever light you will, of business or study, 
of work on the common levels of our life, 
or the fairest summits, — you touch the one 
verity everywhere, that to be wholly in the 
spirit of what you do is the final secret of 
all pure worth in the doing. 

So when we pass from such instances to 
ask what this man means by saying he was 
in the spirit on the Lord's Day, and what 



INTHESPIRIT ^7 

worth there may be in it for your young life 
and my old one, here is the first truth as 
it touches the man. The tradition is that 
he was banished to Patmos, to work in the 
mines there, because he was of the outcast 
and branded Christian sect ; and if this is 
the truth, we cannot doubt that his overseers 
would keep a stern hand on him, and allow 
no Lord's Day in leisure to rest, or time to 
worship. He would have to dig and delve 
his full stint, like the slave he was, until the 
time came to lay down his pick and go to 
his hovel. Or, if it was known among his 
keepers that this day was more sacred to 
him than any other in the week, they would 
mark it for him, it may be, with the rubric 
of a deeper misery. But the great and dear 
Friend whose word was the master-key to 
John's life, had said once that not here or 
there, on this high place or that, should men 
seek for some special way to the heart of 
God, but wherever we worship in spirit and 



68 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

in truth, on a mountain or in a mine, as he 
would read the words now. So the desolate 
island compassed by the sea could no more 
keep God out than it could keep the sun 
out, and the low dark cave in which he had 
to delve would be as true a temple as if he 
had stood between the pillars Beauty and 
Strength. His hands would toil at the heavy 
task, but the spell of the spirit was on him 
to lift him out of his misery into these 
visions wherein at last the paradise of God 
is regained. The vision would grow out of 
this power which possessed him, and this faith 
that he was very near to God, and to his 
great, dear Friend, with thousands more scat 
tered over the vast, brutal einpire. He was 
in the spirit, and then the dismal place lay 
close to the gates of heaven. The sacred 
places of his life were far away over the sea. 
The Lord's Day music was the wailing of 
the wind and the moan of the mighty waters. 
There was no human heart there answering 



IN THE SPIRIT 69 

to his own, no winsome human faces to be 
in themselves a gospel, no lesson or prayer 
from another heart, or sermon to help him 
along. He was in the spirit, just that, and 
no more ; but by that one blessed spell the 
whole wealth of sacred places, of symbols, 
music, prayers, lessons, and sermons, would 
grow poor and thin, as the light of so many 
candles is thin and poor what time the sun 
rises and fills the world with light. 

Now, did you ever see that fine picture, 
"The Tuning of the Bell," and notice how 
the workman stands with his hammer, waiting 
on one with a musical instrument, who is 
looking upward as he touches the strings, 
as if he would bring the melody out of the 
very heavens ? The great heavy mass, and 
the man who has moulded it, have to wait 
on the eager searching spirit of the tone- 
master, or the work when it is done will 
be ''jangled, out of tune, and harsh." It is 
this Lord's Day spirit to the work and the 



70 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

workman, and the hiding of fine harmonies 
within material things. It was the instance 
to me of the thought which has dwelt with 
me many years now, and grown clearer with 
the years. 

We are in the spirit on the Lord's Day, 
and then we can hide its fine harmonies in 
the week-day work. I will give place to no 
man in my faith that every day is the Lord's 
day ; that work well done is also worship ; 
that the ring of the hammer is as sacred as 
the striking of the harp ; the hum of honest 
industry, as the psalms of the sanctuary ; and 
the long strain of the week-day burden, as the 
sabbath rest and prayer. Every word of this 
is true ; but, then, for that reason I must be 
in the spirit on the Lord's Day as I am also 
in the week-day; and, if I deem work as 
sacred as worship, the canon holds good 
again, that I must deem worship as sacred 
as work. Life to the most of us on our week- 
days is a hard battle with heavy labor, and 



IN THE SPIRIT 71 

too scant a rest. We look for our Sunday as 
in stony Arabia the traveller looks forward 
to palm-trees and a well. We are hungry in 
the heart and athirst and tired, and it may 
be disheartened. I am in the spirit on the 
Lord's Day, and in the spirit of the Lord's 
Day, it is a battle-flag and a trumpet, 
bread that never moulders, wells that never 
run dry, a great sweet shadow in a weary 
land. I go to my church, and bear up my 
minister, then, on the wings of an eager 
longing to welcome his thought, instead of 
beating his wings down with the rain of my 
indifference. I pour out the oil of my wel- 
come over the dry sticks, perchance, of what 
he may truly call his "effort;" and it is as 
when the fire came down, and licked up at 
once offering and altar, and wrested Israel 
in a day from Baal back to God. I turn to 
my books when I come home ; they reveal 
deeper meanings in the quiet restful hours, 
and a sweeter grace. I seek th.e woods and 



72 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

meadows ; they are haunted for me by the 
spirit of my day. The great tone-master has 
attuned all things afresh. A voice has said 
again, ''Behold, I make all things new." 



luio Emigrants 

Gen. xi. 31. 32 

TF you take a map of the region in which 
the man lived, whose story I want to 
touch for you as it touches my own heart, I 
think you will be able to form some idea of 
what he did in contrast with what he set out 
to do. Haran is about a day's march from 
the old homestead he left, while Canaan is 
ten or twelve ; and it is easy going to Haran, 
one would think, but very hard to Canaan, 
because after you leave the place at which 
he halted, and push on toward that he 
aimed at, you have to cross a river over 
which there is or was no bridge, a desert 
of seven days' journey, and the rugged 
passes of the mountains. So that to reach 

73 



74 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

Haran from Ur would be a sort of picnic ; 
but to reach Canaan after that would be 
a painful pilgrimage, which would demand 
about all the pluck and courage there was 
in you. 

Then, if we could see this Edessa, as it 
came to be called at a later day, we might 
guess how Terah caught the idea of going 
to Canaan. Edessa is a pretty little place, 
travellers say, as you shall find anywhere in 
old Chaldaea. It stands in a sort of desert, 
beside a deep, clear spring, in the midst of 
shade-trees and fruit-trees ; and, above this, 
there rises a great rock on which there has 
stood a fortress, time out of mind, to which 
they could retreat when the enemy came, and 
defend themselves when there was no hope 
that they could do this on the plain. This 
was about the sum and substance then of 
Edessa, — a small place standing by itself in 
a desert, very pleasant and good to live in if 
you are content to live in a small way, and 



TWO EMIGRANTS 75 

nourish no ambition for a wider and larger 
life. 

Now, Terah, if we may trust the old 
traditions, was a brass-founder in this pent-up 
place, and his special line of business was 
the making of molten gods. But such an in- 
dustry as that must have been rather limited, 
for good reasons. Only so many would be 
wanted, at the most ; and they would not wear 
out as wagons do, and ploughs, but the older 
they grew, the better the people would like 
them. Nor would there be any great improve- 
ment possible, except by permission of the 
priests, who are usually the last men in the 
world to admit that such things can be im- 
proved ; so the poor man could not strike a 
new idea in this matter of the molten gods, 
and push the old incumbents from their stools, 
or melt them over and bring them out in a 
finer fashion, allowins: buvers so much for the 
old metal. 

We may guess, therefore, in what a strait 



76 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

Terah found himself at last, and why he may 
have begun to look with longing eyes west- 
ward. This Canaan away over the river, the 
desert, and the mountains, seems to have been 
a sort of Pacific Slope in those times ; a splen- 
did land of promise, in which you could live to 
your heart's content, when once you got there ; 
widen the whole horizon of your life ; find un- 
told outlets for your powers ; plant the stocks 
anew which had no room to grow in the 
pent-up garden-plat of Edessa ; and then die 
when your time came, happy in the thought 
that you had made your stroke, and opened 
the way toward a larger and fairer life. 

So Terah, as I have come to think of him, 
it may be because I am an emigrant myself, 
— began to look with longing eyes toward 
the land of Canaan. He was ready, as he 
thought, to give up comfort for freedom ; and 
a home and workshop in a pent-up place, in 
which he was bound to follow time-honored 
traditions and usages, for a tent, if it must 



TWO EMIGRANTS 17 

be so, on the breezy slopes away beyond the 
mountains, with the ocean for his boundary 
on the one side and the desert on the other; 
and to exchange the safe citadel on the rock 
for the nobler fastness of a manhood that 
would hold its own against the world, and 
win. 

It was a tremendous thing, as things stood 
then, to do. I think I can see him through 
the mists of time, sitting there in his work- 
shop with his gods about him, trying to 
count the cost ; and all the time, as he thinks 
of it, the plan grows more and more feasible. 
Then he consults the young men about it, 
his son and nephew ; and of all things in the 
world, of course, this is what they would like 
to do, especially his son, who has already 
begun to dream of a wider and higher life 
for himself. So there would be a notice, 
we may presume, sent through the town, of 
a house and shop for sale, and the molten 
gods withal, at the buyer's owm price, because 



7^ TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

Terah must be rid of them, he is going far 
away. Then the roots of his life would be 
torn out of the soil in which they had flour- 
ished, from father to son, ever since the 
times of the Tower of Babel. And there 
would be weeping among them, I think, and 
visits made to the graves of those they had 
loved, and the homes of their kinsfolk all 
about ; and then, on a morning, you would see 
them set out on their day's march to Haran, 
where they would halt, and start on the mor- 
row toward the river and the promised land. 
That morrow never came to Terah. How it 
was, we do not know : we only know this, 
that forward to Canaan he does not take 
another step. Haran itself is a pleasant place, 
I hear, with plenty of good land about it ; and 
there would be a better chance for life and a 
living, it may be, there, than any he had left 
behind him in Edessa. Be this as it may, 
reason or none, there he staid a great while, 
and there he died. One day's march from the 



TWO EMIGRANTS 79 

place he had left, ten or twelve from that he 
dreamed of, far away yet from the promised 
land. And so never now will he see the 
white glories of Lebanon, never the summer 
splendors of Hermon and Sharon, and never 
the blue sea turning to gold as he watches 
it at sunset from the crests of Carmel. He 
started on a journey : it ended, one might 
almost say, in a jaunt. He dreamed of the 
mountains, and settled on a flat. His ideal 
was freedom, to be bought with a great price ; 
he struck this one stroke for it, and accepted 
comfort again on good securities. He went 
back no more ; but then, he went forward no 
farther, — got his chance just this once at a 
singular, separate, generous, free life, which 
held in its heart unknown treasures of great- 
ness and worth, if he had only gone forth 
that morning, and made them his own. The 
morning came, and Terah was not ready. He 
was not to be one of the units in our life, 
after all, but only one of the vulgar fractions ; 



So TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

not one of the men vAio stand out in clear 
and bold relief against the darkness of the 
ages, but one of the masses of men, — Terah, 
the father of Abraham, who set out for the 
IDromised land, and then halted at the end of 
the one day's march. 

But now as I watch him sitting there, I 
am moved to make some i^lea for a kindlier 
judgment than this I have rendered touch- 
ing his failure. It is clear, for one thing, 
that he is far on in years when he feels this 
impulse to strike out toward a wider and 
finer life ; and so his years would tell against 
him. Old men soon tire of new adventures. 
They are ''afraid of that which is high." 
Then this was not only change which was 
waiting in his outward life, but a wrench to 
his inward life also. This son of his, who 
grows to be one of the supreme men, you 
know, of the world, has set his face already 
against the old gods, and is no doubt look- 
ing forward to the new home as a place 



TWO EMIGRANTS 8i 

where he will not only be free to go where 
he will and do what he will earthward, but 
heavenward too ; and I think Terah guesses 
this is just what will befall them. So we 
may imagine where the main trouble lies. 
Here is a man setting out on a great new 
enterprise, at a time of life when Nature op- 
poses instead of helping him ; looking for- 
ward with his eyes, while his heart is looking 
backward ; a man with Canaan on his lips 
and Edessa in his marrow ; giving up the old 
paths which are as familiar to him as his 
own dooryard, to wander away over hills and 
dales all new to him, and all strange. I do 
not wonder the old man's heart failed him. 
He needed more than an impulse to lift 
him out of his old life. Only an inspiration 
could do that, and I am not sure even this 
could have mastered him when so much of 
life lay behind him. And so he must have 
said sadly enough, *' It is no use. I will not 
go back, but I cannot go forward. I will settle 



S2 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

down here, and wait for the angel of death. 
I can still do a very good day's work in 
Haran. They have no such gods here as I 
used to turn out in the old place. Their 
ideals are low. I will go to work and improve 
them." Something like this he must have 
said to the young men, while they talked 
vWth him of the better land, its freedom and 
beauty, and its rich reward. They spoke of 
freedom, he preferred safety ; of the moun- 
tains, he was wedded to the flat ; of the sea, 
he liked the little river better purling along 
in the sunshine ; of great rides across the 
greensward, he liked his arm-chair better on 
the porch in summer, and in winter by the 
fire. " So Terah took Abram his son and 
Lot his brother's son, and Sarah his daugh- 
ter-in-law, and went forth with them from 
Ur of the Chaklees to go to Canaan ; and 
they came to Haran and dwelt there, and 
Terah died in Haran." 

But we have to notice, again, that this is 



TWO EMIGRANTS 83 

by no means the end of the one day's march, 
for now we see what we have come to call 
"evolution" at work. Terah brings the young 
men so far toward this larger and better life 
he would fain have found, and then the im- 
pulse in him to go forward is mastered by 
the longing to sit still. But the time comes 
when that which was only an impulse in the 
father changes in the son to an inspiration 
through which he not only carries out the 
whole intention of Terah, but does more than 
he ever dreamed of doing, because that which 
was only a desire in the first man to better 
himself becomes in the second a blessing to 
the race, and the whisper of ambition in the 
one man changes in the other to the voice 
of God. 

I need not dwell long on this point in the 
story. I need only say that there is no 
evidence, or hint even, of a Divine light and 
leading in what these men are doing, until 
Terah is dead. But then God speaks to his 



84 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

son, bids him get out of Haran, and pass 
over to the promised land ; and once there 
he becomes the springTiead of the floods of 
blessing to which the prophets belong and 
the psalmists, the seed of a mighty and 
matchless harvest the world is reaping still 
for the everlasting life. So, while the old 
man never saw the promised land, the young 
man saw it, and pre-empted it, as we say, 
for the home of the race which lay in his 
loins when he did cross the river and the 
mountains, and saw the land he had been 
dreaming of so long, while the old father's 
arm was about his neck, holding him back 
from his great desire. And so it seems but 
the simple truth to say that some touch of 
this glory rests on the old man's grave, — 
after all, because we have no sure reason 
to think that the son would have gone to 
Canaan if the father had not set out to go, 
even if he did break down at the end of 
the first day's march. The impulse came 



TWO EMIGRANTS 85 

first, the inspiration followed ; but who shall 
be sure we could have had the one without 
the other ? There are those, I suppose, in 
Edessa to-day, who have come straight down 
from some man who was quite content to 
stay there when Terah tore out the roots of 
his life ; called him an old fool, perhaps, for 
not letting well enough alone ; bought his 
molten gods, it may be, — a dead bargain, — 
made money on them ; and never once in all 
his life looked beyond the palm-trees and the 
spring : but in all the world you would hardly 
find a poorer story of what men may do for 
the world's help and blessing than such a 
line of men would have to tell you. It is 
the first step which costs ; and taking this 
first step, I love to believe, did something 
very noble for the genius and inspiration 
which has made our Bible the supreme book 
of the world, and this Hebrew line the great- 
est touching the religious life the world has 
ever known. Terah's dream never came true; 



86 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

but then, he had the dream, and did some- 
thing to make it come true to his son, and 
so to the race. They say the way to hell 
is paved with good intentions. Well, here is 
one of the good intentions, then, that pave 
the way to heaven. He did see the promised 
land, after all, through the eyes of the man 
he had gotten from the Lord ; and there was 
a strain of the sturdy striving which had 
paid the price of leaving the old place, in 
him who would never stop until he came to 
the new. So his feet also are beautiful upon 
the mountains, though he never saw them, 
I said he started on a journey, and it ended 
in a jaunt ; but this must not blind us to 
what that jaunt must have cost him, — the 
great sorrow of parting, — the heart-ache of 
the man who seems to have stopped for the 
bone-ache. He did not do all he set out 
to do, let us allow this ; but he did more 
than any other man of his clan in Edessa ; 
and dying in Haran, he was not only one 



TWO EMIGRANTS 87 

day's march on the road to this larger and 
finer Hfe, but he had made it so much easier 
for the young men to go right on to the 
end. 

And so this man's life touches yours and 
mine, and opens out toward some truths we 
may well lay to our hearts, and this is the 
first : That, if I want to do a great and 
good thing in this world, of any sort, while 
the best of my life lies still before me, the 
sooner I set about it the better. For, while 
there is always a separate and special worth 
in a good old age, this power is very seldom 
in it, I would try to verify ; and it is not 
your old Philip, but your young Alexander, 
who conquers the world. I can remember no 
grand invention, no peerless reform in life or 
religion, no noble enterprise, no superb stroke 
of any sort, that was not started from a spark 
in our youth and early manhood. Once well 
past that line, and you can dream of Canaan ; 
but the chances are, you will stop at Haran, 



88 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

so this putting off any great and good adven- 
ture from your earlier to your later age is like 
waiting for low water before you launch your 
ship. If we want to make our dream of a 
nobler and wider life of any sort come true, we 
must push on while the fresh strong powers 
are in us, which are more than half the battle. 
The whole wealth of real enterprise belongs 
to our youth and earlier manhood. It is 
then that we get our chance of rising from 
a collective mediocrity into some sort of dis- 
tinct nobility. We may be ever so sincere 
after this, as far as we can go ; but we shall 
only go to Haran. Yes, and we may have a 
splendid vision, as when this man saw Her- 
mon and Sharon and the sea in his mind's 
eye, as he sat in his chair ; and a noble and 
good intention, as when he started for the 
mountains, and halted on the plain : but just 
this is what will befall us also, if we are not 
true to this holy law of our life. 

This is my first thought ; and my second 



TWO EMIGRANTS 89 

must take the form of a plea with those 
who do strike out to do grand and good 
things in this world, and do not halt, but 
march right on, and then nourish a certain 
contempt for those who still lag behind. The 
chances are, it is because these begin too late, 
that they end too soon ; and it is no small 
matter that they begin at all. For myself, 
I can only blame them, when, with the visions 
of a nobler life haunting the heart, they tell 
me that Haran is good enough for anybody, 
and we need none of us look for any thing 
better. If they know all the while, as this 
man knew, that the land of promise still lies 
beyond the line at which they have halted, 
and will say so frankly, though they may go 
only the one day's march, I can still bare 
my head in reverence before such men. I 
know what it is to leave these Edessas of our 
life, and what it costs ; how the old homes 
and altars still have the pull on you, and the 
shadows of the palm-trees, and the well at 



90 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

which you have drunk so long, and what lov- 
ing arms twine about you to hold you back 
from even the one day's march. So, when 
I hear those blamed who stop short still of 
where I think they ought to be, I want to 
say, Have you any idea of what it has cost 
them to go so far as that, and whether it 
was possible for them to go any farther ? 
And then, is it not a good thing anyhow to 
take those who belong to them the one day's 
march, and, setting their faces toward the 
great fair land of promise, leave God to see 
to it, that this which may be no more than 
an impulse in the man who has to halt, may 
grow again to a great inspiration in the son 
of his spirit and life who goes right on ? 

And this, I think, is what we may count 
on in every honest endeavor after a wider 
and better life. So I like the suggestion 
that the way the eagle got his wings, and 
went soaring up toward the sun, grew out of 
the impulse to soar. That the wings did not 



TWO EMIGRANTS 9^ 

precede the desire to fly, but the desire to fly 
preceded the wings. Something within the 
creature whispered, ''Get up there into the 
blue heavens ; don't be content to crawl down 
in the marsh. Out with you ! " And so some- 
how, through what would seem to us to be an 
eternity of trying, — so long it was between 
the first of the kind that felt the impulse, 
and the one that really did the thing, done, — 
it was at last, in despite of the very law of 
gravitation, as well as by it; and there he 
was, as I have seen him, soaring over the 
blue summits, screaming out his delight, and 
spreading his pinions twelve feet, they said, 
from tip to tip. 

I like the suggestion, because it is so true 
to the life we also have to live, — trying and 
failing; setting out for Canaan, and stopping 
at Haran ; intending great things, and doing 
little things, many of us, after all. I tell you 
again, the good intention goes to pav^e the 
way to heaven, if it be an honest and true 



92 JALKS If) yOlJNr, M fi N 

intention, 'i licrc is a pin-fcalhcr of the f -ir^l';'', 
wing started .sorncw}v:rf: in our starting, — a 
soaring wliif.h goes f;ir hf:yor)d our stopping. 
Wr: TDUy only f'/:t tr> the edge oi i\n: sirjugh, 
l^iif. tfiose who rorne after us will soar f;ir iif; 
tow;ird tlie sun. 

So let me end Vv'ith a word (A eheer, Tiie 
Moslem says, " Ciod loved AhfJallah so well 
that lie would not h:t him .'itlairj to that he 
most deeply desired." And Coleridge says, 
" I am like the ostricli : J cannot fly, yet f 
have wings that give nje the feeling of flight. 
I am only a hirrl of the eart'u, hut still a 
bird." Arjd Kobertson of iirighton says, 
"Man's true destiny is to be not dis.satisficd, 
fjut fr^rever 7^;;'sati;jne-d." 

And you may set out even in your youth, 
therefore, with this high i>urj>ose in you I 
have tried U) touch. You will njake your 
way to a good place, a wider and more 
gracious life, do a great day's work, rise 
above all mediocrity into a distinct nobility, 



TWO fiMir,|/ANTS 93 

find some day, that., thou^^h you have done 
your best, you have fallen far below your 
dream, and the Canaan of your heart's desire 
lies still in the far distance. You have nr;t 
labored in vain : no man ever ean who puts 
this noble heart into it all. Vou h;i.ve got 
iht feeling (A flight. 'Ihe terms <>{ riJng are 
in all you have done as a man among men, 
evangelist, reformer, day-worker, I do not 
care. All grand and great things lie in the 
heart of our striving. Then 

"Sudden rest rnay fall on v/caried sinews; 
We may droop and die: th': work continues. 
God names differently what we call failin;(, 
In a ;^lorious miat hi.H jjurpose veiling." 



VI 

iTwo Chilbren 

Gen. xvii. 18 

npHE boy in whose behalf this most touch- 
ing and pathetic prayer is said was as 
yet the -only son of his father, and stood in 
the direct succession to his estates ; while the 
father seems to have concluded also that he 
was to inherit the promises through which 
his race would possess the land to which he 
had emigrated from the old home beyond the 
Euphrates. It was, indeed, very much as one 
of our Puritan ancestors in Plymouth or Salem 
would think of an only son, who would not 
only inherit all the wealth he had got hold of 
in land and cattle, but would also carry out 
the promises which had brought him over the 
sea. The promise of a new church and com- 

94 



TWO CHILDREN 95 

monwealth, so intimately one that the secular 
should be sacred and the sacred secular, and 
the whole commonwealth part and parcel of 
the kingdom of God on the earth, — this seems 
to have been the dream the father had been 
cherishing, as he watched the boy grow toward 
the promise of a man after his own heart. He 
had laid out a plan for his future, and settled 
every thing so far in his favor ; and then one 
day it is whispered to him that he is to be 
the father of another son, who will push this 
one down, and take the first place ; and it is 
this that compels him to cry to the Most High, 
*'0h that Ishmael might live before thee!" 
He cannot have it so. He has set his heart 
on this ruddy young creature, who is running 
over the wild uplands so full of life. He wants 
his own way, right or wrong. He would set- 
tle this question of who should be greatest, as 
it ought to be settled, through his love for 
the boy who had brought so much brightness 
into his old age. But it is no use : his prayer 



96 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

cannot be heard and answered in this way. 
There is a blessing in store for the boy, but 
not this the old man would have. He will be 
the ancestor of the tribes of the desert, and 
the father of princes ; but the fairer promise, 
over which the heavens are bending, rests 
forever with the unborn child. So there is 
no more to be said. The passage closes with 
a word v^hich ends the matter once for all: 
" He left off talking with Abraham, and went 
up from him." 

Nor can I be mistaken, I think, in saying 
that when you read between the lines of this 
far-away chapter in the story of a very noble 
house, you are pretty sure to find yourself 
on Abraham's side, — for Ishmael, Because 
he was the first-born, for one thing, and had 
his rights on this ground to whatever worth 
lay within his birthright, in a land and time 
when this law of primogeniture was of the 
very first moment. Then, again, he was the 
darling of his father's heart, who had worked 



TWO CHILDREN 97 

for him and saved for him, and thought of him 
always as his heir down to this day. Nor had 
the boy done any thing as yet to disturb this 
right of succession ; while, in a time with 
which he had nothing to do, his poor mother 
had gone through troubles which must have 
cast a shadow over his whole childhood ; and 
still, again, it must have been hard for him 
to have such a childhood as his fine, free 
nature demanded, if he lived much under 
Sarah's eye, who could carry things Vv^ith a 
high hand when she was in one of her black 
tempers, and make the father of the faithful 
himself behave very much like a poltroon. 

We have to notice, also, as the younger 
son grows up, hov/ thin a shadow he casts 
against the curtain of these old days. He 
seems like a ghost, compared with his great 
old father. He is a mother's boy, in the 
rather poor sense of keeping close under her 
wing, and never rushing out on a separate 
adventure of his own that would make the 



98 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

blood in him tingle to the tips of his fingers. 
And no good and quiet boy in the Society of 
Friends, on a fine old farm in Pennsylvania, 
following close in the footsteps of Friends' 
Meeting through the long traditions of First 
Day and Fourth Day, could ever be more 
entirely to a mother's mind, I suppose, than 
Isaac was to Sarah's ; while, on the other 
hand, such glimpses as we get of Ishmael 
in the Bible, and the traditions which have 
lingered like long echoes among the tribes 
who claim him for their father, reveal a pres- 
ence which reams and pulses with life, and 
is all on fire with the qualities we love to 
see in a growing youth, because they hold 
in them the promise, as we think, of a bright 
and strong manhood. Why should not a lad 
like Ishmael get his rights, then, we say, 
against a lad like Isaac, when we see how 
each life opens in the course of time ? and 
what is this man driving at who indites the 
chronicle which makes Heaven interfere to 



TWO CHILDREN 99 

give him the lower and poorer place ? Here, 
surely, to a rational mind, which will not 
believe that to be true which smites at the 
roots of equity, is one of the things we have 
to reject in the interest of the revelation of 
which it claims to be a part ; or, if we accept 
the story as it stands as true, we must look 
within the lines, as well as between them, for 
our belief that the man is right when he 
sets the question in this light. 

It is because I believe he ivas right, that 
I have taken up the question, and then be- 
cause I think the truth he tells us runs 
through the very marrow of this life of ours 
now, and touches us in the same close and 
painful way as it touched this old man and 
his boy, on the one hand ; while, on the other, 
it brings a truth home we all have to pon- 
der, of as deep a moment as any we can 
touch in the interests of the soul, shall I 
say, as these stand in conflict with the senses. 

For, true as it is that the boy was not to 



100 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

blame, yet blame comes with him and clings 
to him, poor fellow, though he can help it no 
more as yet than an Ethiopian can help his 
color. And it is true here, as it always is and 
must be, that you have to go beyond Ishmael 
before you can get at the rights of his troubled 
life. He was Abraham's son, but he was not 
Sarah's son ; yet Sarah, with all her faults, was 
the man's true wife. And here lies the main 
root of the trouble. For you will often notice 
how these men who stand out in such bold 
relief in our Bible, tamper with this most sacred 
order of our human life, — that a man shall be 
the husband of one wife, — and for reasons 
which seem good then and there, take other 
wives, or do worse, and have children by them, 
just as they do up here among the mountains, 
to the disgrace and shame of our nation. And 
you may easily imagine they have got Heaven 
on their side, if you are to accept all that 
is said about the transaction, just as our 
Mormons do, who can give you chapter and 



TWO CHILDREN lOI 

verse for their sin and shame ; and if you 
allow their canons of inspiration to be true, 
as my good Methodist brother did who went 
out to 'Mabor with them," they will leave you 
not a foot to stand on. 

But when you leave the Word to follow the 
deed, and then trace the deed by the law of a 
clean and true life, the law of one wife and 
one husband, it is not hard to see where the 
truth of God abides. I do not remember one 
instance in the Bible of this invasion of the 
purity and cleanness of our life, which does 
not turn out in the end to be a great and 
sad mistake, bringing trouble and dismay to 
the man who makes it, and revealing itself in 
some sad way, soon or late, in the children. 
It may be a case like this, or like that of 
Jacob who should have married Rachel for 
his one wife, or like those of David or Solo- 
mon, or any of the rest : it comes back on 
them all at last in trouble and shame. Their 
sin finds them out. And so this poor boy has 



102 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

to bear the brunt of his father's evil deed ; 
the disturbance of the old true order is in 
his life when he is born. God is with him 
to the great heart of the seer who tells the 
story, to make the best of him, and bring 
what good can be brought out of the evil ; 
but there lies the evil hidden in his heart 
all the same. He will be a wild man. His 
hand will be against every man, and every 
man's hand against him. The wild, passionate 
resentment of the mother driven out into 
the wilderness lurks in the son ; and it will 
drive him out, and sow itself afresh through 
thousands of years, as I read the story, in 
the untamable tribes which are to wander 
over the desert and live from hand to mouth ; 
while the children of the younger son, the 
happy child of promise, over whose birthright 
the very angels are standing guard, will live 
out this Bible, and .then write it out, and the 
nations will find in it the word of God to man. 
You see the drift of the truth I want to 



TWO CHILDREN 103 

tell, then, and how it comes home to those 
who may be tempted to swerve from the one 
true law, and to start influences that may 
run through the ages to come in human 
lives ; or, standing true to this law, take 
those from God over whose advent the 
angels will bend with a loving concern and 
care. Jesus said, "There is nothing secret 
that shall not be revealed, and what is done 
in the closet will be proclaimed on the 
house-top." And so I tell you young men 
especially, for whose souls I watch as I 
watch for my own, you can invade these 
most holy laws of our life, and imagine you 
have covered your tracks, and yet by that 
one sin you shall hurl a calamity through a 
hundred years, and strike your great-great- 
grandson who may be sitting where you are 
now in 1987. Yes, and you may still send 
the calamity on through the ages to strike 
and miss, miss and strike, like a jumping shot, 
through a thousand and a thousand years, as 



i 04 f A 1 . K S lO Y O ( ] N ^ , M H N 

this iTian rlifl who cried, "Oh tliaf. Ishmacl 
rniKliI hvc before thee!" !)0 I think tfierci.s 
soniethiiif.', re;illy noljh; in the rn.'in wlio says, 
" If I sin, 1 know I .sh;ill snffe-r, and f do nf;t 
mean to creep ont of il even nnrler :\ rolx: (A 
imputed righteousness. I will t;d<e tlx; l^ilter 
the best I may, for T have- h.id wh.it I deemed 
to b(! the sweet." I>nt this person;d penalty 
I c,'i,n hen.j- myself is one of the .sinij^lest ele- 
ments, after ;i.ll, in the :;ohition of this awful 
prol^lem of the sowing ,'ind the reapin;^. The 
real nerve of the fjne.'Jion m.'iy lie f;irlheron. 
I h.'id <'i friend once who lived ;is tiMir; to the 
l.'iws of our life ns uwy m.'in I have ever 
known, hnl his ^reat-grandsire, who w.-is a 
;j;e)ier;d in the Revohil Ion, ;ind whrit you c;dl 
";i, hijd) liver," sent down to him the sure 
result of su( li livin;.^ ; ;iiid so my ])oor frienrl 
used to say he did not think it w.'is f.iir th;it 
he should have the j.^out lo torment him, a 
perfect ;d):,1;iiner .'is he w;is, while the old 
gener;d h.id tlu' w\u<'. So you strain your eyeji. 



TWO (A\l\.\)UhN 105 

and your son has to wear spectacles. You 
drink l.hc dram, and sccrn no worse ; but your 
son h;i.s to stagger for it. ()r, iukv, to these 
wild ways, and say you are ready to bear 
the pf:n,'dty ; but yr)u may be nble to do no 
such thing. Vou m;iy be ";;;ived," as you say, 
by God's grace, Hke a br.ind pbieked from the 
burning; yet there m.iy Ix-. a man in the 
world you love better th.'in your life, who 
sliall be like this f.'.fim.'ud, a wild ir);i.i), r'ind 
the sire of wild men, to iIk; cikI of the 
chapter. 

There is n,nr>tlier trulh in tfiis struy of a 
family, we may well consider also, and it is 
this: If Hagar had been the one wife of this 
man, she was not the woman to bear this child 
of the jvromises. Hagar the ICgy[jtian, we hear 
her called, — a slave given to the man winm 
he was over there, as some imagine, but in any 
case a woman with a poorer nature and a 
lower faith. Now, f care not how good it may 
seem to a man to take a wife of a lower and 



106 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

meaner nature than his own, though a voice 
out of heaven may seem to say, "This is 
the woman for thee;" the children will fol- 
low the mother, and the whole world cannot 
alter the law any more than it can alter the 
tides. And so, on the other hand, when men 
of the world say, " I leave the religion of the 
family to my wife, and attend to business," 
and know as they say so that the wife has 
indeed the deeper and truer heart toward the 
immutable things of God, they may be aware 
of a touch of humor on the edge of their re- 
mark, and perhaps take refuge from the church 
themselves in the Sunday-morning paper ; but 
they have touched in the saying one of the 
deepest and most momentous truths they are 
ever likely to reveal about their home : that 
the mother has the deeper heart, and will raise 
children of a finer type than her husband. 
The children follow the mother in this inner 
life. It is a wonderful touch in the Gospels, 
which makes Mary stand in the light of 



TWO CHILDREN lO/ 

heaven, and leaves Joseph in the shadow, 
when they would account for the man Christ 
Jesus; wonderful, and yet natural as life itself. 
Mary holds all these conditions of the diviner 
life in her nature ; he is the holy child be- 
cause he has this holy mother, and we could 
have the world's divinest manhood in no 
other way. 

So Ishmael was a wild man, and he became 
an archer, and dwelt in the desert. His hand 
was against every man, and every man's hand 
was against him. The tradition of the desert 
runs, that, when Hagar got him all to herself, 
she led him back to her own gods ; but Isaac 
stays in the tents, and learns the lessons of 
faith in the one God, eternal and invisible, 
his father had made so far good. Ishmael 
was in some respects by far the finer crea- 
ture, as I think of him, — ruddy, restless, full 
of life, and clever with his hands and feet 
and eyes ; but he was a wild man, as empty 
of the higher vision as the goats he chased 



I08 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

over the rocks. There is a vast difference, 
Seneca says, between refusing to do Vv^rong, 
and not knowing how. Ishmael, poor fellow, 
had neither the ignorance nor the self-govern- 
ment ; and so he became the sire of such a 
line as we should have in our wild new West, 
if the gentler and deeper-hearted Isaacs did 
not go there to start and maintain the finer 
and nobler life. 

For Isaac stands to us for the type of 
the inward life, and Ishmael of the outward. 
This, of the supremacy of the soul over the 
senses; and that, the supremacy of the senses 
over the soul. This man for whom the father 
prays is a bit of pure nature ; but that for 
whom Sarah watches is touched by the grace 
which purifies, exalts, and transforms. The 
one child may storm about the earth, but the 
other will stay near the gates of heaven. 
Ishmael will find a woman in Egypt, and 
marry down to his grade ; but Isaac will 
marry the maiden who was born unto Bethuel 



TWO CHILDREN 109 

the son of Milcah. And he will have his 
own troubles ; but the gentle heart given to 
meditation will find its way through them all, 
and the days will declare the secret the old 
man's prayers could not alter. 

And so this lesson comes from the old 
time to the new, in this parable of two lives : 
That there is a law of life Heaven will not 
tamper with for all our prayers, a steady 
sequence of cause and consequence we have 
to abide by whether we like it or not ; a 
right way and true, touching these founda- 
tions of our life, out of which Bibles may 
grow in the long succession of the ages, and 
a line of men and women whose life will 
enrich the world. This, and a wrong way 
that will lead on to a hapless life full of wild 
deeds that end in a clouded heaven, and this 
life will go on also until the evil has wrought 
itself out by the mercy of God. We may 
say what we will, therefore, about standing 
ready to suffer for our own misdeeds, and to 



no TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

pay as we go: the woe of it is, that no man 
liveth to himself, and no man dieth to him- 
self, and the shadow of such a truth is just as 
sure as the light. 

It was among the teachings of a faith which 
has well-nigh passed away, that a man might be 
in the eternal felicity, and see his son welter- 
ing in the eternal fires, yet feel no heart-break 
over it, but still " praise God from whom all 
blessings flow." I wonder how it would be, if, 
in the light of this truth I am trying to touch, 
that son could cry from the deeps of his 
despair, ** You put me here. We ought to 
change places," and as he said this, Heaven 
should flash her light on the whole woeful truth 
of it. I think there would be silence in heaven 
for more than the space of half an hour, so 
far as one singer was concerned, and, if the 
father did not get down to suffer with his 
son, there would be a revolution. 

And, then, this lesson : How a man of no 
great natural power or splendid quality, if he 



TWO CHILDREN m 

has this inward life in him by his birthright, 
and nourished forth in his breeding, bids fair 
to be of vastly more worth than the most 
superb piece of nature which was ever born 
and bred bare of this blessing. He is the 
Ishmael in the human family, and even at his 
best is only a noble and splendid animal, — 
the Jim Fisk, it may be, without the railroads, 
or the John Morrissey without the cards. 

And this lesson : That there is no great 
hope for the child who has not the right 
mother, except as there is hope for all chil- 
dren. The father may be never so noble and 
faithful in his way, set his heart on the boy, 
and pray a prayer for him which will touch 
human hearts by its pure pathos after four 
thousand years. All the same, by this law 
we can trust and follow, it is the mother's 
nature which will give us this outward or in- 
ward man, the Isaac of the home or Ishmael 
of the desert. If she has caught into her 
heart the love of God and goodness, if she 



112 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

cherishes a true loyalty to Heaven, like Mary, 
and turns the great moments of her life into 
a sweet communion, then she also shall have 
good children. But if within her heart there 
lurks the taint of idolatry to the god of this 
world, and she follows this as the load-star 
of her life, she will mould her children to 
her own inner likeness, and lead them after her 
own gods ; and the end will be a great sorrow 
instead of a great joy, — a great sorrow, but 
not endless. 

For, as in this old chapter from the history 
of one of the ''first families," we have to see 
how, long after the children of the promise 
had fulfilled the promise in giving us the 
prophets and the Christ, and had been beaten 
and scattered as the thresher releases and 
scatters the grain, this wild man did come to 
something noble and good in its way after 
all ; ripening into a man like Mahomet, and 
into a race like the Saracens in Spain, sweet 
and fine, while it lasted, as a Norway summer. 



TWO CHILDREN II3 

As this did come of Ishmael's line, because 
the wild man was never left to himself, and 
because the children of the promise also helped 
to lift him out of the dominion of the senses 
into a sense of the soul, so it is, in the long 
range of the Divine goodness, with this whole 
wild world. It wanders on in its own way, 
and riots and wrecks ; but there is a saving 
running through all the spending. The lower 
life slowly makes way for the higher ; the 
face learns first to turn to its Mecca, and 
then to heaven. Thousands of years your 
wild man may wander, but he wanders home 
at last to God, — 

" And learns to call upon his name, 
And in his faith create 
A household and a fatherland, 
A city and a state." 

He sits down at last, poor wild man, 

clothed and in his right mind. *' God makes 
himself an awful rose of dawn," and then we 



114 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

see, somehow, that, as the shadow is to the 
light, so is Ishmael to Isaac ; and He has 
perfected his picture as surely through this 
man's wandering in the desert as through 
that man's abiding in the home. But this is 
the truth for this day : — 

" Hold thou the good, define it well, 
For fear divine Philosophy 
Should push beyond her mark, and be 
Procuress to the lords of hell." 



VII 

Ihe Primitiue 36ea of a 16006 Ulifc 

'"- Prov. xxxi. 10 

'T^HE picture we saw in our lesson of an 
old Eastern homestead must have been 
a study from the life ; but no man can guess 
now who painted it, or who the good wife 
was we see there, or her good man, or where 
to look for the place on a map. All we 
know about the land is that it lay well 
toward tlie north, where the snow fell in 
winter, and good warm happing was needed 
because of the cold, and the days grew so 
short that you had to rise before dawn in 
the morning, and work after dark, or the 
day's work would not be well done. 

And I suppose the picture was painted 
with no thought at all that it would ever 



Ii6 ■ TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

find a place in their Bible ; but they loved 
it so for its own sake, that the day came 
when a wise seer no doubt said, ''Why, this 
is good enough to go into the rolls we read 
in our synagogues, so let us set it at the 
end of our Book of Proverbs. The other men 
have had enough to say about evil women. 
We will match them with a good woman, and 
see what honey will do, if the aloes fail of 
their purpose, with the youth of our land." 

So this was done ; and there the homestead 
stands among the vines and olives all these 
ages, with the corn-lands about it, the cattle 
in the meadows, and the sheep on the uplands, 
and the goats; with* the sun shining through 
the w^indows by day, and the lights gleaming 
out at morn and even for evermore. And 
the good genius of the home is this woman 
we see, who has not one word to say for her- 
self, and yet stirs some human heart to speak 
for her to this fine purpose ; who has no 
name, and yet has won the noblest ; a woman 



A GOOD WIFE 117 

who, if this be indeed a study from the life, 
came to this man in her sweet, fair maiden- 
hood, to be true wife to him, and was true 
wife ; that and no more, that and no less. 
No slave of his whims and fancies, or wife to 
wonder in what mood he will come home, and 
whether his first word will be first cousin to 
a kiss or a blow ; and no drudge to wear her 
life out in helping to make a fortune, as his 
first wife, he will spend in jewels on the 
second. True wife to true man ; clothing her- 
self afresh to his heart, as her beauty fades, 
with a beauty that cannot be seen. True 
wife and true mother ; raising her children to 
make other homes like this they love so well; 
cossetting them a little, we may presume, 
and her grandchildren a great deal when their 
turn comes, for what would such a woman be 
if she did not nourish the " simple merry 
knack of tying sashes, fitting baby's shoes, of 
stringing pretty words that make no sense, 
and kissing full sense into empty words " ? 



»i^ TALKS TO YOUNG MIJN 

So, true wife to true man, wc can see her 
there in the far-away years, growing old at 
last, and not so active as she was, or so full 
of care. The snows fall softly on her hair, 
the afternoon shadows grow longer, and the 
sun sets, and she falls on sleej), never think- 
ing in all those years that her memory would 
stretch beyond two generations ; and yet here 
I am, after more than two millenniums and in 
a world she never heard of, setting her sweet 
old portrait in the light of a day of which she 
could not dream. 

And in trying to open my thought, may 1 
not ask you to notice, first, with what large 
free lines this picture is drawn. There is no 
such limitation to her nature as we have to 
note in some women, who are very good 
indeed, but then their worth is like the reports 
we hear of some rare old wine, — it takes up 
but little room, and is apt to be hidden away 
in cabinets, and only brought out and used 
on choice occasi(jns. There is no such trouble 



A GOOD WII-I-: "9 

about this portrait of a woman of the old 
time and tenor. It is a larger and ample 
nature God has given her, which not only 
fdls tho |)lace completely, but is felt far and 
vvid(" : so that, whili* soint; will say, she is 
such a man's wift?, others will say when you 
ask about him, he is such a woman's husl)and ; 
and so the; honors will be divided. 

You may notice also that she has what 
we call faculty ; the quality a fine l^>en( h- 
vvoman had who said that if she should f.dl 
on evil days she knew how to do twenty 
things by any one of which she; could and 
would make her own living. In that busy 
home, where things are done very much as 
they were done in New luigland on the 
farms a hundrecl years ago, you feel sure 
there is n(jt one thing she ha.s to see to, 
she cannot do better than ever a woman she 
hires ; and tin; [)lace is in |>erfect order, 
because her own presence pervades it from 
cellar to attic. So there they are at the old 



120 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

homestead, busy as bees, — the house-mother 
and the maids who will also be mothers some 
day and have homes of their own, while she 
is not only mother but missionary to them 
also, and her great plentiful nature overflows 
into finer issues than those that lie in bread 
and butter and home-made cloth and yarn. 

It is not very often we see or hear of such 
a woman, again, so superb in faculty and 
oversight, who can maintain through it all 
a sweet and even temper. These demands 
on her life tell on the nerves, and she is 
apt to have what those who know her best 
call "a temper of her own," and the breath 
of her mouth has in it a touch of the east 
wind. Such an one was our good friend Mrs. 
Poyser. There are lovely touches of tender- 
ness in the woman there who fronts the world 
and fights her battle ; but how Martin Poyser 
managed to find the home a man wants to 
find within that old manor-house, I cannot 
even guess, nor can I guess how he would 



A GOOD WIFE 121 

ever make up his mind to stroke her hair 
after a few years, or say tender and loving- 
words to her except when she was down with 
one of her fits of sickness, and then I think 
she would be apt to break in on it all with 
some question about the cream. But this 
good wife's nature is struck out in one line. 
"In her tongue is the law of kindness." So 
you can hear the sweet tones pervading the 
house always ; and by ruling her own spirit 
she was queen in her own domain, while 
her good man would never think of the 
proverb, "It is better to dwell alone on the 
housetop than with a scolding woman in a 
wide house." 

It may easily fall out, again, and does fall 
out, that your good woman who is so true 
to her home, and fills it so well, will be 
quite content with what the man calls her 
"sphere," and will not care to do any thing 
outside this, beyond what such women love 
to do in their quiet way, in the tender chari- 



122 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

ties that come home to them as women, the 
social duties that belong to our finer life, and 
the care, it may be, of their church. It is 
the man's habit to say also, if he is much of 
a man, and has had the good fortune to win 
one of these noble women for his wife, " My 
dear, what do you know about business ? 
You must leave that to me." And then, if 
she has promised to obey him, — not if I 
marry them though, — there is no more to be 
said, and only one surmise to be made just 
here : That it is precisely because the man 
despises the woman's swift and sure intuition 
as the ally of his slower judgment, that so 
many of our business men come to grief, in 
so many unexpected ways, in our own time. 
Now, there may have been some little trouble 
of this sort in the way of this good wife ; 
but if there was, it is all over and done with 
before we come across this picture, and she 
is not only caring completely for her home, 
but is also a capital woman of business. She 



A GOOD WIFE 123 

has money of her own, made or saved ; has 
seen a lot that lies well to the sun, and will 
make a good vineyard ; thinks the matter over 
carefully and well, sees her chance and seizes 
it, buys the field, and has it planted for a 
vineyard, and, let us hope, can leave it to 
whom she will. And then, if there has been 
a little cloud between them as they sat by 
the fire, I think I can see the good man 
open his eyes wide, and hear him say, "Why, 
my dear, you do understand business, after 
all." 

I notice, again, it is not good marketing 
up there in the North : there is scant choice 
when you want to buy, and too many taking 
toll when you v/ant to sell. But she is not 
only a good woman, and able, she is wise 
also, and so she opens a way directly to the 
primal buyer and seller, for so we must read 
the words which compare her to the mer- 
chant ships ; while you cannot palm off on 
her a poor and mean article, for ''she per- 



124 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

ceiveth that her merchandise is good;" while 
of course, being the woman she was, the 
officers at the custom-house would not feel 
their life was made a burden to them be- 
tween chivalry for her sex, and fidelity to 
their oath of office. I speak only as a man. 
So it is not in her home alone, you see, and 
in society, that this ample nature is content 
to move : she has her own bank account, and 
makes her own investments, and we may be 
sure made them wisely, or else her good man 
would never have said, " Many a man's 
daughter has done well, but thou excellest 
them all." 

We might fairly infer, again, that with so 
many cares our good wife would grow a 
little careless about herself in the course 
of time, and neglect those nice points in 
her adornment, which, in despite of all we 
say about following the mode, do hold their 
own intrinsic worth in a woman's life. She 
did not make this mistake. She seems to 



A GOOD WIFE 125 

have said in her heart, " Did I adorn myself 
for the advent of my lover ? well, that was 
not as the purple and gold anglers use to 
catch a fish withal : I will still adorn myself 
to please my husband. Has the glamour of 
those early days when we were lovers rip- 
ened into a sort of comradeship ? then my 
comrade shall be as proud of his wife as he 
ever was of his sweetheart. Does yeoman 
Agur's wife over there on the next place 
say it makes no matter what you wear in 
the house, so that you keep a sharp lookout 
of the windows ? it is not sound doctrine. 
Men, at the best, are curious creatures, and 
think a great deal more sometimes than they 
say. My good man shall never say I do not 
care more for the glance of his eye than I 
do for that of all the women between here 
and Jerusalem. Or, is there something in 
dressing to your fortune, again, and is the 
silkworm a factor in the scales of commerce 
and the arts as well as the flax-seed ? then 



126 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

what a woman of my fortune may do v/ith a 
splendid propriety I will do, so that when 
my good man sitteth among the elders at the 
gate, they shall not whisper, ' A good man, and 
a very able wife ; pity she should be such a 
fright ! ' Here, also, are my daughters grow- 
ing up ; and it will be the lovely old story 
over again of the youths coming with shining 
eyes to look on the maids who have taken 
them in the old sweet thrall. They shall feel 
no cold chill as they glance my way, and 
wonder whether maids so beautiful, and with 
such exquisite ways, will ever grow to be 
like their mother in bearing the cares and 
burdens of life. I will see to these things 
for my husband's sake, and theirs also, and 
the life in which we hold the right to move." 
So we see her ni her best as well as at her 
best, in the fine old picture, and her clothing 
is silk and purple ; while you see the house- 
hold also, as well as herself, gleaming with 
touches of color, scarlet against the snow. 



A GOOD WIFE "^V 

Then another fine touch comes in, we must 
not miss. There was a real danger that this 
woman who could easily have made her living 
doing twenty things, would lose her heart's 
pity and sympathy for those who could only 
do one, and were not clever even at that ; 
and failins: to understand how that could be 
so hard to them, which was so easy to her, 
nourish for them a certain scorn and con- 
tempt. Or, woman as she was, with this fine 
faculty in her for ''making money," as we 
say, she might have come to have too hard 
a clutch on what she made ; and because she 
had her eye also on another lot, which vv'ould 
lie so nicely in the lap of the first, and would 
go to Miriam while that went to Deborah, 
when she was through with earth and time, 
she must save every dollar and every ^gg, 
the hundredth part of a dollar, and so keep 
on saving and investing to the end of the 
chapter. Nor need we doubt that she could 
have easily recited reasons in plenty for such 



128 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

a course, if she had been of that mind. The 
poor are thoughtless ; they will not lay up 
for a rainy day ; they are extravagant also, 
and wasteful, and do a sight of things we 
never think of doing, to their hurt and loss. 
Yes, and every word she could say might be 
true. Yet she would be an untrue woman 
for closing her heart to all these poor who 
came for some little gleaning from her boun- 
tiful harvest ; and even if the good man 
should come to be hard and keen after 
money too, he would not like her so well, 
or hold her in such reverence, because men 
do not like themselves so well for such a 
reason. The question never came up. The 
fine, affluent nature responded well. " She 
stretches out " not her hand to the poor, but 
her hands. And I warrant you it was none 
of your back-door charity done by the maids, 
and therefore done all wrong. She stretches 
out her hands, this lady of mark, in embroid- 
ered silks, and does it for her own sake as 



A GOOD WIFE 129 

well as theirs, because she is God's almoner. 
So it is the crowning glory of the good wife, 
that she stays good and generous, and the 
purple has no steel under it fencing the heart 
against God's pity and his Christs. 

There is one touch more, but it is like one 
of those fine touches Hogarth leaves hidden 
now and then in an inference. " I have not 
given her that upward look," the writer seems 
to be saying, ''which is in the eyes of the 
saints." But then she never thought of her 
religion as something apart from or above 
her life. She simply lived it out day by 
day, without reference to frames and feelings. 
And so he only adds this line, "A woman 
that feareth — reverences — the Lord, she shall 
be praised." She has shown her faith by her 
works. What would you have more ^ So I 
will leave the fine old picture as he has left 
it, to draw one or two conclusions. 

I. Let us all believe this for our comfort, 
if we need any now, or for our instruction, 



130 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

if we shall need that to save against the 
time to come, that a woman of such a splen- 
did nature and so strong a will must have 
found there were many hidden oppositions in 
her good man she had not suspected when 
she took him for better and worse ; and he 
would have to say, more than once or twice, 
'' Women, the best God ever made, are an 
enigma to a man ; " and then they would 
both find out that with this faulty and finite 
nature they were both of kin to the infinite, 
and these mysteries of the unguessed must 
come to the surface now and then. Nor can 
lives so near revolve as the planets do, and 
never strike fire. But the sun would break 
out again after the electric fires had met in 
the mid-heaven of the home, and all things 
grow calm and sweet, and the trouble would 
be forgotten. 

2. May I not say one modest word, also, 
about the fine pov/er this good woman reveals, 
as it rests and turns on a good constitution, 



A GOOD WIFE 131 

— for he has painted us the picture of a 
woman healthy as May, — and say it for this 
reason ? 

It is matter of deep concern to a good 
many, that the woman over here is losing 
her hold on life, and there are no such wives 
and mothers as there were in the old days. 
There is one answer to this as a wide propo- 
sition. It had always been the outcry ever 
since we have kept the records ; and if it 
were all true there would be no women by 
this time, and no men. It is not true in the 
wider sense. It is only true in any sense, as 
we forget or refuse to learn the great true 
laws of life, and, as this man says of this 
woman, fail to gird our loins with strength 
and strengthen our arms. That wise and 
good woman, Lucy Aikin, says in a letter 
to Channing, *' Fifty years ago our ladies in 
England had pinched figures, pale faces, weak 
nerves, and miserable health. Then we began 
to discard the things that had worked such 



132 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

mischief for us, wore stout boots, bid defi- 
ance to what we call foul weather, became 
great walkers ; and now the new generation 
has a new bloom on the cheeks, active habits, 
firm nerves, and good constitutions." The 
great-grandmothers of the new race in Eng- 
land, then, were very much like our girls 
now, only not so peerless fair. The race has 
been restored to a splendor England never 
saw before ; and ours also, wherever there is 
a touch of wisdom about the true laws of 
living, is gaining ground, and nowhere more 
surely than in New England, where I think 
the trouble began. You would not thank me 
to pursue this theme, but I could not pass 
it without this word. When the chief in one 
of the South Sea Islands wanted to be sent 
to another island as a missionary, his fellows 
said, "Yes, let him go. He is a two-handed 
man ; he has a good wife who will take hold 
with him, and do what he cannot do." So 
will this race be, with the good wife to 



A GOOD WIFE 133 

double all the powers of the good husband. 
And her children will rise up to call her 
blessed, and her good man say, " Many women 
have done well, but thou excellest them 
all ; " and Jier works also shall praise her in 
the gates. 



VIII 

Debt 

2 Kings iv. 7 

T KNOW of few things in our life so full 
of peril to a young man as running into 
debt. It has done more damage to our finest 
manhood than any other thing I can think 
of, except drinking whiskey ; and to a good 
many men there is no danger from that, even, 
so long as they stand free from this curse. 
But a man is driven into the second evil often 
in trying to forget the first, or to abate its 
burden ; and so he is like one who tries to 
escape from some place so dark that he 
can bear it no longer, — to find the light he 
plunges into, ending in a conflagration. 

Debt is the old story of the slave who was 
told by his tyrant to forge a fetter for his 
limb, and then to forge a chain one link a day, 

J34 



DEBT 135 

and then to drag along the ever-growing load 
until he lay down in his tracks to die. But 
it is the old story with this difference : that 
the debtor accepts the fetter and chain as a 
favor ; thinks he can easily unlock the thing 
before long, and go free ; finds this is all the 
time growing harder to do, while each day 
adds a new link to the chain ; and revolts 
in the measure of his sterling honesty from 
saying, "I will drag the chain no longer," 
because he knows he is bound to drag it to 
the last sore pinch by a law to which we 
must stand true, — the holy law of obligation. 
Then if, for his life, he feels he must be 
free, and has to go through the courts, the 
brightest day he can think of is the day 
v/hen he shall have paid the last cent he 
owes, or when those who have trusted him 
shall say, "We know you have done your 
very best to pay your debts. It is a misfor- 
tune we must bear together : here are your 
vouchers, put them in the fire." 



136 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

That is about the best release we can ima- 
gine for this sad burden ; but the worst is, 
that a man may be able to break the fet- 
ter, and care so little about it, that, if he 
can find some one to trust him, he begins 
at once to forge another ; breaks this, and 
so keeps on until the sin smites 'through 
his life, and ruins all the safeguards God 
sets about us as we set fences about fair 
gardens. Then those who might look up to 
him by reason of his ability, look down on 
him by reason of his character, as a man 
who will not keep faith with his fellows ; and 
pity at the best takes the place of respect. 

So runs the story of many men who have 
made shipwreck of fortune, character, and 
life itself, within my knowledge, seeking 
graves that v/ere opened by their own hands ; 
or who still live to work more mischief, and 
cover themselves with a deeper disgrace and 
shame. So, what word can be said to the 
new generation, every serious man, who has 



DEBT 137 

seen much of life, should ask, not in the pul- 
pit only, but at the fireside, and in the stores 
and schools and workshops, which may help 
those who have to take hold as we leave go, 
so that they may never come to the sorrow 
and loss which has overtaken the elder 
generation in our time. 

And it is not true, as we might well ima- 
gine, that only those of a poor and shiftless 
sort drift into debt, who, being hardly able 
to make the world about them aware they 
are in it by the weight of their intrinsic 
worth, gather moment by every cipher in 
the sum they can manage to owe, so that 
when death comes to close the account there 
is a keener sense of loss among their cred- 
itors than might have come through the 
death of much better men. And if this were 
the only man who is taken in these traps, 
or who takes honest men in them rather, it 
would be bad enough ; but I might spare 
this talk, because the chances are, they would 



158 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

not be here to hear me, while the creditors of 
such men who take their risk at cent per 
cent perhaps might be left to pocket their 
loss. But the worst of the curse, as we elder 
men know, is this : that it so very often takes 
our choicest young men captive, and drags 
them down to this shame ; young men with 
that eager and high spirit in them through 
which so much is done ; men of a genuine 
honesty, so far as good intentions go, when 
they set out in life, and who run into debt, if 
they don't take care, with some such feeling 
as your eagle has for a great wall. " I can 
soar over it," they say, "never fear. Once 
let me spread my wings, and find free play, 
and I shall be free from this at one flight." 
Nor is it the fetter and chain we saw just 
now, to which these finer natures become 
imprisoned. It is rather a thread of golden 
wire so fine they do not see it at first or 
feel it ; but day by day other threads are 
bound about them, and these twist themselves 



DEBT 139 

at last into a cable from which they find it 
very hard and bitter work to get free. 

I see these new men waking up to face 
the new day. There are thinkers among them, 
and orators, statesmen, and great merchants, 
if they will only take care. They may not 
take care ; and then, though they still attain 
to the eminence, it may be with them as it 
was with grand old Walter Scott, who, as he 
sat on the green at Abbotsford, dying of over- 
work through debt, threw off his wrappings, 
moaning, "This will never do. I must get 
to my work ; " and when he tried, could not 
hold a pen, or dictate a word, but sat still 
with the tears running down his fine old face, 
beaten in the brave battle and slain by debt. 
Such young men as I think of may be ready 
to create new homes, bring a family about 
their knees, and be in God's stead, almost, to 
the little community within the four walls. 
But this fair promise may be blighted too. 
Yes, and I can see how they may lay this 



HO TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

thing to heart, and say, " I will make it as 
the one thing needful to pay my way from 
the start, and keep right on ; for this is the 
one safe thing to do." I see such men 
growing old at last, their homes standing on 
strong foundations, and their children rising 
up to call them blessed. 

And if, once more, my years have brought 
me any wisdom, this danger from debt follows 
very straight and simple lines. It was said of 
Edgar Poe, that he was a millionnaire who 
never had a dollar to his namiC ; and I have 
a friend who said to me once with a real 
sadness, " I have the fortunes of a pauper 
with the tastes of a prince." Well, you shall 
have a gold-mine in your brain, as my friend 
has, with this trouble in you also, and never 
be free from this curse of spending when you 
cannot spare. A wise old Roman said once 
that not to have a mania for buying whatever 
strikes your fancy, is to possess a revenue. 
And no truer word has ever been said about 



DEBT 14^ 

these debts which are made from over-spend- 
ing, this weaving of the fine wires that take 
us captive. 

I knew a man some years ago whose genius 
was in itself a noble fortune, and who might 
be said to talk golden eagles ; but here was 
the trouble with him : he had this mania for 
buying every thing that took his fancy. Bring 
him to New York with five hundred dollars 
in his pocket, and set him down in Madison 
Square, and the chances would be, that by 
the time he reached the Battery he would 
not have ten dollars left, or would be five 
hundred dollars in debt, if he could get the 
merchants to trust him ; and no thing he had 
bought would be of any real use to him. 
Now, what was the result } I will tell you. 
He was kept grinding to earn money, like 
a blind horse in a mill, or like the poor 
creatures I always pity so, on the threshing- 
machines, that are always climbing, but still 
stay down, and have to be content, when 



142 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

their day's work is done, with the raff and 
refuse of the grain. It is but the instance 
of a vice which has eaten like a cancer into 
our Hfe, and wrought untold disaster. 

You come to a city like this, from your 
wholesome country homes, with the power in 
you to win your way to a good place. You 
begin low down, and hold on for a time to 
the careful habits in which you have been 
trained, and make ends meet, and something 
over. The firm is generous, or, it may be, 
only selfish ; it wants, at any rate, to keep 
its good men, and so it promotes you. Then 
you have more money, and you know the 
reason why. You are worth more. Then 
the world about you begins to notice you are 
a rising man, and invites you to its feasts 
ana frolics ; and there is a fine grain in you 
which makes it hard to refuse, or to be mean 
in the matter of paying the world back in 
its own coin. So there may be no evil in 
you when this happens : yet this vice will 



DEBT 143 

creep in of spending for a score of things 
that are proper to society, but are a threat, 
all the same, to the sincere safeguards of 
your life. And you may not run into debt 
as yet, but you have come to where they 
draw the golden wires. You spend all you 
earn, with the feeling you can make more ; 
and you do make more, but then you spend 
that too. 

Moreover, you find a wife some day, very 
much to your mind ; but you cannot begin 
life in a couple of rooms, with a hempen 
carpet and cane chairs, because society might 
turn its back on you, and society is now your 
god. But you find new powers to meet the 
new demand, and begin business for yourself, 
or are promoted again, and still might do 
well if you would keep close to the solid 
and sure things you understand ; but the 
fatal lesson young men have learned, of being 
able, as they imagine, to command success, 
steals in, and lures you after vain shadows. 



144 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

We must be patrons of the arts, perhaps, 
and buy pictures with the money we shall 
need some day to tide us over a panic ; and 
are not content with the modest house we 
can pay for as we can pay for a loaf of 
bread, but must rent a mansion. Then the 
oil men come along, or the silver-mine men, 
and show us what they call ''a good thing," 
and say they will 'Met us in," and they do. 
So we drift into speculations we understand 
no more than the man in the moon, or think 
we can clutch ten thousand dollars in a 
month from those wise and wary men on 
Wall Street, who have given a lifetime to 
watching the rise and fall of stocks, — take it 
all in, as we imagine, at a glance ; and this is 
the story of the wreck and ruin of thousands 
of men of a fine promise, who, twenty years 
ago, were on the way to a fair fortune. 

But I say that no one lesson men can 
learn, whose life lies in the main before 
them, can be of a deeper moment than this : 



DEBT 145 

That if we devour all the corn we can raise 
in the seven good years, or go sowing it on 
the barren wastes of speculation, we shall 
have to hang round the garners of the pru- 
dent and careful when the seven years of 
scarceness come, and implore, when we might 
command. ** How is it," they said to the 
good Scotchwoman, "that your son John, who 
had so fair a chance when you set him up 
in business, should have broken down, while 
you began with nothing at all, and are now 
well off?" — "I will tell ye," she answered. 
*' When we began, my auld man and me, we 
lived on oatmeal and haver bread, and a' 
things of that sort, but when we began to 
be weel-to-do we would noo and then have 
a chicken ; but the trouble wi' John and his 
wife is, that they began wi' the chicken, and 
noo they can hardly get the oatmeal." 

That has been the trouble with thousands 
vv'ho twenty years ago caught the trade-winds 
to a fair fortune ; while, if vvc could explore 



146 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

the secret of hosts of men who have made 
fortunes, and have not one dirty dollar in 
their account, we should find they began 
with the oatmeal, and let the chicken wait. 
Did not trust at all to their genius for carv- 
ing out a fortune while they spent one, but 
made sure of the overplus in the good times 
which would tide them over the bad. 

So the first thing to be sure about is this : 
Do not spend money you cannot well spare. 
If you buy a Bible, even, you cannot afford 
to buy just then, you wander to v/here the 
wires are set, and may do more harm to 
yourself thereby than the Bible will ever do 
you good. Nay, I will say more than this. 
If you so misread your Bible as to trust God 
will take care of you when you ought to 
take care of yourself in this most sacred 
business of paying as you go, you had better 
sell your Bible at the first old book-store, 
and buy ''Poor Richard's Almanack," or "The 
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin." 



DEBT 147 

I like that word of a sound divine who 
says that next to the grace of God, paying 
our debts right along is the best means of 
grace in the world to deliver us from a 
thousand snares. 

And, if such a word as this should miss 
its mark, there would still remain a great 
cloud of witnesses, we elder men remember, 
who have stripped themselves to the bare 
bone to keep their good name, and are brood- 
ing over their broken fortunes, and their lives 
robbed of hope and joy. Men who struck on 
the rocks over which it seemed easy enough 
to ride when the high tides of prosperity 
were running full and free, but that are 
fatal as death if you are in the channel 
when the tide goes down, and the storm 
comes up, and there is no escape. "Do you 
know where all the reefs and shallows are 
hereabout ? " they said to the old pilot. 
"Not sure I do," was the answer; "but I 
know where the deep water is, and so I get 



148 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

along." It is what we should know about 
this danger from debt : I must know where 
the deep water is. I must disdain to be a 
royal spender, contract no debts, and take no 
risks I cannot see through or make good. 
And then I go far to compel Fortune her- 
self to give bonds for my success ; but failing 
here, it is as when the spring fails in my 
watch. 

I knew a man in my youth who was a 
pattern of piety ; but he ran deep into debt, 
insured his property for quite all it was 
worth, was told it was on fire one morning, 
but would not turn out and see to it until 
he was through with family prayers. The 
place burned down ; and then he tried to 
collect the insurance, but the insurance men 
said, "No." And there were good people 
who said this was all wrong, and he did 
right to have family prayers before he went 
to put out that fire ; while the honest and 
manful world about him said that to put out 



DEBT 149 

the fire first, and then say his prayers, would 
have been the most honest course to take, 
to say nothing about its piety. He went 
down, and his good name with him, and is 
buried in a lost grave on the other (under) 
side of the world. 

Dr. Johnson said of a man in his day, 
he had no genius, but he was so true to his 
pledge, that if he had promised you an acorn, 
and none grew in England that year, he 
would send to Denmark for one rather than 
break his pledge. It was a grand thing to 
say of a man ; and it comes home to the 
heart of my thought, for, of all the promises 
I know of, my promise to pay stands among 
the first. 

Now, to close my talk, I might tell you to 
say some little prayer over all this, and I 
will not tell you not to — God forbid ! But 
would you not also do this at the prompting 
of one who has seen a great deal of ruin 
wrought through debt and easy-going spend- 



ISO TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

ing, with no resolute will to save, on his 
way through this world ? Would you not see 
where the leaks are in your young life, if 
there be any ; where the wires are that may 
as yet be almost invisible, but which may 
grow to cables or chains in a few years' 
time ? And then, would you do a little sum 
for me, and so for yourselves ? Take your 
pencil, and find what even a dollar a week 
may come to, well invested, in ten years and 
then in twenty, and so on to the end of the 
chapter, and then see how much better you 
can do than that even, and yet be in every 
way a generous and kindly gentleman in the 
measure of your means. For in asking you 
to keep out of debt, and be careful in your 
outlay, I advocate no meanness. Money may 
be bought too dearly ; and we may any of 
us run some risk of becoming like the old 
Scotch nobleman, who would not give his 
tenant a quittance for the rent until he had 
hunted up a missing bawbee. He brought 



DEBT 151 

the coin, and then said, " Noo, my lord, I 
will give you a shilling if you will let me 
see all the money you have." He took him 
at his word, showed him all his treasure, and 
then the farmer said, " That will do. I am 
just as rich as ye are noo. I have seen all 
the money, but I cannot spend a pound of it, 
nor can ye, my lord, either." He was richer 
than the old lord; he was free from the 
chains the money had made for him, I 
would have you so free ; and yet I would 
speak to you as my sons touching this need 
to keep free from the other and more woful 
fetter of debt. We can save if we will, and 
still spend for all fair and true purposes ; 
and the wise and prudent do save, while the 
heedless spend as they go, and it may be 
we take hold and help them. I never quite 
digested one of the best dinners I ever sat 
down to in my life, because it came out after- 
ward that my host owed for that dinner and 
a great many more. There may be danger 



152 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

on the other side. The habit of saving may 
grow on us so that we shall never bloom out 
into a sweet and generous manhood ; but 
this will always be the exception, not the 
rule, among the men we breed in this New 
World, while this is the contrast all through 
between such men and your heedless spend- 
er : That, cleaving to strict and stern justice 
in their dealings, as your "close" men always 
do, the day never comes when they do not 
keep their side of the contract. Do not run 
into debt, then. Save, that you may spend. 
Do what a true man may do to provide 
things honest in the sight of all men. Owe 
no man any thing, in this noble way, and 
then you will make all men your debtors for 
the sterling and noble ensample you set to 
the world about you. 



IX 

Sleep 

John XI. 12 

T NOTICE the old Bible-men make much 
of sleep ; there seems to be more in it by 
far, for them, than there is for the men of 
our time. The first man falls asleep before 
the blessing, which can alone make it worth 
his while to wake again, can come to him, — 
that is, the first woman. The great ancestor 
of Israel wakes from a deep slumber, and is 
satisfied once for all about his future, which, 
up to this time, had been hidden in a sort 
of mist. And Jacob sleeps alone on the 
hills, — a youth far away from his home ; and 
there is a blessing for him in the slumber 
which was not in the watching. So they go 
on sleeping through the books and ages in 

153 



154 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

these old Bible times, while by story and 
prophecy, by psalm and wise saying, we are 
taught how a spark smitten out of sleep can 
kindle and renew the most potent forces of 
life. To sleep well, to their mind, is to do 
well ; and it is a more gracious condition, 
when the true time comes, than to be ever 
so wide awake. 

Yet it is very curious, again, to notice how, 
with this teaching of the Bible touching the 
worth of sleep, there has been a constant 
fight with it on the part of many who would 
be the last men in the world to allow that 
they held the Divine Book of a small account 
when it does not fit their humor. So your 
Romish saint has often been a man who 
could stay awake longer than any other man 
of his day, rise at the most unnatural hours, 
and banish .sleep from his eyes and slumber 
from his eyelids, so that he was a world's 
wonder. One of these saints — St. John of 
the Cross, as he is called — would only sleep 



SLEEP 155 

a few minutes each night, and then it was 
with his head on a spike instead of a pillow. 
Among the sterner sort in the reformed 
churches also, sleep has been deemed some- 
thing to be ashamed and afraid of. ** I am 
guilty," good Richard Baxter cries, "for all 
the sleep I enjoy over three hours in the 
twenty-four." And I found, the other sum- 
mer, it was very hard work indeed for me to 
get through the door of his pulpit in Kidder- 
minster ; but it was ample enough, no doubt, 
for the man, thin as he was, and worn by hard 
labor and much watching. ** Sleep is Death's 
younger brother," Sir Thomas Browne says, 
"and so like him, that I never dare trust him 
without my prayers." And Jeremy Taylor, I 
notice, allows himself not more than three or 
four hours sleep, and sometimes not even 
that : while William Law, a man of the 
purest religious genius and life, says, " Strive 
daily after the spirit of renouncing sleep ; it 
is the poorest and dullest thing possible to 



15^ TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

a man." So the more religious you are, in 
those days, the more unlikely you will be 
to regard this great function of our life 
as a blessing falling softly about you from 
heaven. 

And there were tracts printed in my youth, 
and are still, I presume, meant to make us 
ashamed for ourselves, and to fear for our 
children, through telling how much time we 
spend in sleep, which would be so much 
better spent, in the opinion of the writers, 
in staying broad awake. So very good men, 
in their way of being good, still seem reso- 
lute to forget the hints which come to us 
from the Bible, of the way God has com- 
passed some of his most delicate and far- 
reaching providences while men slept. How 
Abraham was confirmed then, and Jacob com- 
forted, Joseph warned, and Daniel instructed, 
and Elijah recovered while sleeping long and 
well under the juniper-tree ; how Paul was 
succored and directed while he slept, and 



SLEEP 157 

Peter saved from quite an overplus of big- 
otry ; how the Psalmist sings of God giving 
his beloved sleep ; and how, in the oldest 
sacred book, there is solemn and beautiful 
insistence of the truth that God speaks 
"when deep sleep falleth on man, that he 
may keep back his soul from the pit." So 
the records run. Yet sleep is still something 
to be cried down, I suppose, by a great many 
good souls, and to be reduced to its lowest 
minimum. " Lord," they seem to say, '' if 
he sleep he shall not do well ; " do their best 
to show that no good, wholesome, persistent 
sleeper shall enter the kingdom of heaven ; 
and remember the words of Jesus perfectly, 
" Cannot ye watch one hour ? " but quite for- 
get the tender allowance that follows, ''Now 
sleep on, and take your rest." 

Now, we have good ground, I think, for 
quite another conclusion from this, in the 
help Science brings us first of all toward a 
true conception of this noble function, through 



158 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

which, indeed, she is reversing the judgment 
of the saints, and teaching us that when we 
sleep, as when we wake, we shall do well ; 
teaching us that as a rule, subject to such 
variations as may lie within each man's nature, 
a good, sound, restful sleep, of let us say 
eight hours, is, in its own way, holiness, while 
not to sleep so much as that, if we need so 
much, is a sin. So that a man like Baxter, 
with his nerves all on the surface, and his 
delicate frame, ought to have blamed himself 
because he slept so little, and said, " I shall 
be a better man every way, and so, of course, 
a better Christian, if I can sleep more ; 
therefore I will strive after this blessing as 
I strive after truth and virtue." 

Because the first truth we touch is this, 
that a good sound sleep is, in the best and 
truest sense, what we may well call ;r-crea- 
tion. In our active and troubled day, the 
books tell us, the pulse beats faster and 
faster, and the torrents of life increase hour 



SLEEP 159 

by hour in volume and intensity. Action, 
conflict, thought, labor, and care demand 
fresh efforts ; and through all this, and by it 
all, as when with file and emery-wheel you 
work at some delicate piece of mechanism, 
so all day long, through this process, the fine 
tissue of life is worn away. 

I use my hands and eyes, my brain and 
muscle, my nerve, and that wonder within 
the nerve no man can reach ; and whatever 
I use is wasted, or, shall we say, passes into 
other forms. So the words which are spirit 
and life when they reach you, are in some 
sense material substances when they leave 
the speaker. The finest ideals of the painter 
reach back into the finest organisms, and 
draw on these for the picture as well as on 
some higher power. And the immortal num- 
bers of the poet, also, are born of a mortal 
body ; yes, and as the body is, so are the 
numbers, so that Pope could no more write 
like Tennyson, or Byron like Wordsworth, or 



i6o TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

Herrick like George Herbert, than grapes 
can grow on thorns, or figs on thistles. 

Here, then, is the worker, but within the 
worker stands the watcher. All day . long 
there is a guardian angel bending over these 
fine tissues and substances of life, to see that 
they shall not be wasted beyond the line at 
which they can be made good again when 
"God giveth his beloved sleep." So when 
the true time comes, if we are wise to heed 
the angel, he whispers his word and weaves 
his spell ; and we enter — not into the 
shadows of death, for that is a wretched mis- 
take, but into the portals of a new life. Then 
these exhausted and wasted powers, fevered 
and feeble by the long day's work, feel the 
touch of renovation. If our sleep is that 
which nature has ordained, there are workers 
we know nothing of, so shy that they stop 
instantly and hide themselves when we do 
know, — these restore the balance for us, 
weave new tissue for every wasted nerve and 



SLEEP i6l 

fibre, tone down the pulse again to its 
healthy beat, store new treasures of spiritual 
force and fire within the brain, transform us 
into new men and women ; and then when all 
this is done, and well done, the bells can ring 
and call us to our labor or our prayers. But 
they ring before this at our peril. It is not 
in the service of God we wake before our 
time, except there be some clear need, which 
will not be said nay, for such waking ; and no 
good man will try to save his soul even at 
the cost of so badgering and injuring his 
body. He may well do that for others when 
the need comes, but not for himself. 

When the old saint had cheated himself 
out of his rest so that he could not sleep at 
all, and was like to die, it was borne in on 
him to repeat his paternosters just as long as 
he could drone them out, and this would ban- 
ish the fiend, he imagined, that was tormenting 
him. Well, he went off to sleep with the 
beads in his hand, and then concluded that 



1^2 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

the Evil One is helpless to keep you awake 
if you still persist in saying your paternosters. 
But I think he should have said that to go 
through such a sing-song is as when you rock 
a child in the cradle. There was no evil spirit 
about, except one of his own creation ; and 
we can all create such an one if we persist 
in staying awake beyond the line Nature 
and the grace of God has drawn for our 
sleeping. 

For, if the positive is true, so is the nega- 
tive. Some mighty hunger to do things shall 
make us deaf to the whisper of this good 
angel of sleep ; then all through the day and 
far into the night we can work, while the 
organisms waste beyond the power of this 
merciful provision for their re-creation, and 
then, because the balance is lost, the forces 
of life run faster and faster while the chan- 
nels waste away, and the pressure on the 
brain and nerve becomes more tremendous 
while all the time we become less able to 



SLEEP i<53 

bear it. The energies are wasted faster than 
they can be made good again by such sleep 
as we allow ourselves to take ; and then we 
take that, perhaps, to sustain us in the 
struggle, which should never be touched for 
such reasons. We beat back these affluent 
mercies which come for our saving through 
sleep ; use eyes, nerves, and brain with quite 
a savage energy ; and use up principal and 
interest together. And so we drive on until 
we break down ; then we send for our doctor 
to set us right again, who looks us over, 
makes his diagnosis, and says, — 

" 'Tis nervous prostration, 'tis fever within ; 
He calls it a sickness, I call it a sin.'' 

I note this truth, again, about a good sound 
sleep I remember times, it may be you do 
also, when it was no use working any longer ; 
and so we went to sleep with a feeling of 
despair about us, to wake up agam in the 
sweet still morning to find the figures all 



I64 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

ready to take their place in the problem, the 
lines riveted fast in the memory, the perplex- 
ity growing clear in our business, or the 
argument completed, so that it seemed as if 
some defter spirit than our own had been 
doing these things for us, or some friend 
had come and sown wheat over the tares of 
our half-frustrated yesterday. 

So Coleridge sleeps, you remember, and 
hears them whisper a poem, of which, when 
he wakes, he can only catch a fragment ; but 
no finer fragment ever fell on the human 
ear. It touches the mystery and melody of 
the inner heavens. And Dr. Carpenter, in 
his fine chapter on sleep, has many things to 
tell us of the way in which these powers 
have grown strong and sure while men slept, 
and how the most intricate problems or 
arguments would be found written down next 
morning, and the hand and brain wist not 
what the spirit had done. 

There seems to be some such blessing for 



SLEEP 165 

the spirit in sleep, then, as there is for the 
body ; not alone fresh fuel, but a purer flame. 
And we may presume such boons as these 
are hidden away m every life as it steals 
silently through the night ; and when deep 
sleep falleth on men, God openeth their ears 
and sealeth their instruction. The cup of 
the spirit holds the fresh dews of the morn- 
ing. The dust of yesterday is swept from its 
chambers, noble ideas and aspirations become 
natural again, new suggestions come trooping 
in, and we give them good welcome, and 
wake farther on in life, as well as in time. 
In our waking hours we think and feel, in 
our sleep we become. The poet finds in the 
morning sweeter imaginations, the thinker 
profounder prmciples, the preacher more 
pregnant arguments, and the very worker at 
the anvil, a more subtle turn of the wrist, 
and the stroke that goes right home. None 
ot us who sleep well begin the new day 
where we left the old. Each man in his 



l66 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

rest has silently advanced to a new position. 
He can watch the world from a higher sum- 
mit, and be aware of a wider sky than that 
on which the sun set yesterday. His flesh 
is fresh as that of a little child; he returns 
toward the days of his youth. 

"Last night I weighed, quite wearied out, 

The questions that perplex us still, 
And that sad spirit we call doubt 

Made the good naught against the iU. 
This morning, when with rested mind 

I try again the self-same theme, 
The whole has altered, and I find 

The balance turned, the good supreme. 
A long sweet sleep, a good night's rest, 

Has changed the look of all that is. 
Siire, any creed I hold at best 

Needs humble holding after this." 

Now, let me draw a few simple lessons 
from this truth I have tried to open. You, 
young men, must remember that one grand 
factor in your well being and Vn^cII doing will 



SLEEP 167 

lie in a good sound sleep. You may think 
it does not matter : take my word for it, — 
the word of a man who has had to walk 
through rugged ways to his threescore years 
and three, — that it does matter a great deal. 

Your sleep is the hidden treasure of your 
youth to-day, and to-morrow it will be the 
margin you will have to draw on for your 
age. Do you think you can racket round 
into the small hours, snatch a brief repose, 
and then be just as good as ever to hold and 
bind? it is not true. Many a young man sells 
his birthright in this way, and cannot have 
it back again, though he seek it with many 
tears. Take your honest eight hours sleep, 
if you may : there is life in it and grace. It 
is one of the good angels which will save 
you from the temptation to drink, give you 
an even mind, brighten all your powers, and 
do many things for you no other power can 
do. 

So when you get farther on, and are in 



i68 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

the thick of the world's business, do not for- 
get what virtue lies in this good habit. You 
may make more money by sitting up nights, 
but the chances are you will not keep it ; 
carve out a good business, and then have 
to quit ; or grow eminent in your profession, 
and then break down. Good fortune turns 
greatly on good habits, and this is one of 
the best. We can go just so far, and then 
we have to fall back on Nature and on God 
for new power. But if we say, " I will work 
double tides," and so get fevered and out of 
true with the true laws of success in life, 
then the day comes when our power turns 
to something like paralysis. Your true busi- 
ness or professional man is the man who 
rises well rested, with a cool clear brain and 
steady nerve, — the man who can shake off 
business after business hours, go to sleep like 
a yearling child, and rise like the sun, rejoi- 
cing as a strong man to run a race. 

And that word, a yearling child, reminds 



SLEEP 109 

me, that if you quit yourselves like men, 
and all is well with you, the time is coming 
when you will have children to care for; and 
then you must remember that "if he sleep 
he shall do well," is true also of the child. 
Because we have enough of the old leaven in 
us still to prompt us now and then to try 
and make our children ashamed of over 
sleeping, while, if they are healthy children, 
the chances are that this is what they can- 
not do. They may want to go all wrong 
about the time for going to sleep ; they are 
very apt to do that. All the same, our chil- 
dren must not be tormented with the idea 
that all the sleep they want, and therefore 
need, is either a sin or a shame. Indeed, it is 
true that with the high pressure the schools 
put on their delicate little minds, and the 
keen quality which seems to be in the very 
air they breathe, they do need all the sleep 
they can compass. It is the breath of their 
life, the building-up of their body, the other 



I/O TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

half the task they have only half done, and 
the help of the good angel when our help 
fails. No cruelty can well be worse than 
this that would rob the children of even 
the fringes of this robe which falls on them 
out of heaven ; and no grace better than 
this gospel, *' if they sleep they shall do 
well." 

So this is the conclusion of the whole 
matter. These powers of ours are not to be 
superseded, but made sacred ; and this power 
by which we win new power is a sacred 
thing. Once sure that it is sleep and not 
stupor, recreation and not wasting, it is some- 
thing to thank God for with all our heart. 
And it is a great mistake in good men to 
say this is a shameful waste of time, when 
it may be, and so often is, the best possible 
use of time ; or, that we should be at our 
work or our prayers, while still we need 
this on which the worth of the work or the 
prayer is to turn. 



SLEEP 171 

I say, that to sleep one hour more in such 
a case is better than either to labor or to 
pray, and may bring us nearer both to God 
and man. 



A Koble Anger 

Eph. iv. 26 

T THINK sometimes when I hear men talk 
about the sin of anger, that it would not 
be amiss to speak now and then about its 
holiness also, so that one might see how it 
is not always a vice to be ashamed of, but 
may be a virtue to be proud of in its true 
time and place, and as good and true a thing 
as we can ever nourish in our hearts. 

We might suspect, indeed, that there must 
be two sides to the question, when we notice 
how it is as natural for us to be angry as 
it is to use our hands and feet, and is some- 
thing we do not have to learn, but is right 
there, as we say, a primitive instinct, like 

those of eating and drinking, or laughter and 
172 



A NOBLE ANGER 173 

tears. And so we detect traces of its pres- 
ence in the infant of days, against the chill 
of this strange new world into which it has 
been ushered, and the hunger ; while those 
who have raised many children need no 
very fine ear to detect its ever-growing 
strength in almost any child Heaven may 
have sent them, when the weeks have grown 
to months and years, or to learn that "here 
is the old Adam cropping out again," as the 
father is apt to say so often, and the mother 
so seldom. 

And there are two ways of accounting for 
this inbred instinct. We can say that it is 
the old Adam cropping out in the very cra- 
dle, and here is proof before letters of our 
innate depravity ; or we can say it is no 
such thing, but the indication of a power as 
good and true in its own time and place 
as any we can have and hold ; capable, to 
be sure, as all our powers are, of being 
turned to base and ignoble uses, yet not to 



174 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

be branded for that reason as only evil 
and that continually, but to be guarded and 
guided to a true and good purpose. We can 
sin with our hands and feet, with our eyes 
and ears, and our tongues ; but who would 
say these are depraved, therefore, in the 
marrow of their intention, or that love is 
depraved because it may turn to lust, or loy- 
alty, because men say there is honor among 
thieves ? 

So we can sin through anger, and do sin ; 
but this evil use must not blind us to the 
noble purpose of this passion, any more than 
when good wheat is turned into whiskey, on 
which men get drunken to their hurt and 
shame. The power may be, nay it must be, 
all right, while the use we very often make 
of it is all wrong ; and so one feels bound to 
believe that on this ground there is room 
for the faith that a noble anger has its own 
true place and its own fair use in our human 
life. 



A NOBLE ANGER 1/5 

And it will help us to see what worth 
there is in a noble anger, if we will note for 
a moment or two what a grand part it has 
played in our human history, and how men 
of the finest quality, and the noblest, have 
been most capable of feeling and flinging 
forth its burning fires, and of doing through 
their anger what they never could have done 
through a temper as sweet and placid as an 
inland lake on a still summer s day. 

Had Luther's temper, for instance, been as 
even and sweet as that of Erasmus, the world 
would still have waited for the trumpet-blast 
which ushered in the Reformation. No 
quality in Luther was of a greater worth in 
the work God gave him to do, than this of 
waxing to a white passion, and then hurling 
the bolts of his mighty anger out of the 
fire. Or, had the old lion of England never 
roared and leapt in men like Cromwell and 
Fairfax, and lain within the onset of the 
Ironsides and the Great Parliament ; then, 



1/6 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

for all we can see or say, the foot of the 
Stuarts might still have been on the nation's 
neck, and England — Heaven only knows 
where. Or, had all your fathers, again, been 
as placid and gentle as some of them were, 
we may well ask where the American Repub- 
lic would have been tc-day ? They were not 
placid and gentle. They were men capable 
of this noble anger ; men who could speak 
words of fire, and send them flying across 
land and sea, and, when they found this was 
all no use, could take the paper on which 
such words were written, and wad it well 
down into their muskets, while every thud of 
the ramrod was the answer to a thud of the 
heart. They tried prayers, protests, and peti- 
tions ; they were of no use : and then they 
got angry, and the town-meetings were smit- 
ten with cloven tongues like as fire. The 
eagle came down in the place of the dove ; 
the pulpit shook with the anger of the 
preacher ; the bells clanged their summons 



A NOBLE ANGER 177 

from the steeples, calling men to arms ; lights 
were hung out, sending their angry glare 
through the night ; there was anger in the 
gallop of the horsemen rushing to the fray ; 
and then there was an end and a beginning 
in the rattle of the muskets, and the roar of 
the cannon, of the American Revolution. 

So you will see how no question we can 
think of could involve us in a more curious 
and capital contradiction, than the claim that 
a power of so much worth to the race is 
worse than worthless when you trace it home 
to the man. Or, when we hear it said of a 
man that he was never known to be angry in 
his life, and must have been far better, there- 
fore, than the common average, may we not 
venture on the surmise, that, if this is the 
best proof we can offer for the claim that 
he was a saint, there must have been times 
in his life when he would have grown still 
more saintlike in the square of his capacity 
for such noble sinnin^: as lies in a rio:ht and 



i;^ TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

true anger ? I would not allow for an instant 
that the men I have taken for my instances 
might be very good in their way, but such 
anger was a blot on their scutcheon and not 
an emblazonment of glory ; or, that such a 
spirit must be deplored in each man, while 
we have to admit its worth now and then 
to the race. Anger, I notice, in our good 
honest Saxon, means a constriction of the 
heart : it has grown too big for the breast ; 
there is no even and gentle action in it any 
more, if you listen, but a mighty stroke 
which sets the whole man afire. '' Anger," 
Bishop Butler says, "was designed by the 
Author of nature, not only to incite us to act 
vigorously in defending ourselves from evil, 
but to engage us in defending the helpless ; " 
and the good bishop is a safe and true 
teacher. So, while I know very well that 
charity suffereth long and is kind, there are 
times, all the same, I say, when Charity must 
stand back, and let Severity take her place 



A NOBLE ANGER 179 

and burn to the bone. No greater mistake 
can well be made than to conclude that this 
constriction of the heart, for due reason, is 
somehow not of God, or godlike ; or, that the 
men who have risen to its grand demands 
may be proud of what they have done, and 
we may be proud for them, but we must all 
be sorry for such a temper. The temper 
is the very thing of all others to be glad for. 
The horse-shoe on their brow, in such a case, 
is the patent of their nobility. They were 
whole men because they were angry men, 
and could burn and flame for such imperial 
reasons. 

But here I must halt, lest you and I 
should be exalted above measure, who may 
be ready to conclude too easily we do well 
to be angry for poor and petty reasons, it may 
be, in no wise worthy this majestic power, — 
young men, because they are strong ; and old 
men like myself, perhaps, because touch-wood 
is easily set afire. We have to make sure 



i8o TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

first that it is a noble anger, and not some 
ignoble make-believe ; and then, to see how 
the most momentous interests of our life 
may be put in peril in our failure to feel this 
noble passion, and answer to its demands. 

On the first of these questions I am not 
sure I can say a word you do not know as 
well as I do, because only those of the rarest 
quality escape the reproach of their own 
hearts for getting angry on slight and poor 
occasions. When the old Scotchman said to 
the laird, **I must leave your service, sir. I 
canna stand your temper," and the laird 
answered, " You had better stay : you know 
I am no sooner in one of my tempers than I 
am out again." ** True," the poor man 
answered ; *' but the trouble is, ye are no 
sooner out of one of your tempers but ye 
are in again, and so I will just gang away." 
Now, that man's anger was not a power, but 
a weakness. He squandered the noble gift 
on mean and small demands. He was like a 



A NOBLE ANGER i8i 

man who is forever swearing, in contrast with 
one who uses modest and gentle words until 
in some supreme moment of a mighty indig- 
nation, — such as they say came more than 
once to Washington, — the pent-up power 
breaks down all the barriers ; and then it is 
hke the cursing Psalms, or the comminations 
in Deuteronomy. We must put no indignity, 
then, on this noble gift. It is at our peril 
we let our anger degrade itself down to a 
bad temper. We must have the strength to 
hold it high for a beacon, and not turn it 
into a torch which hisses and smokes in the 
mire of mean and poor emotions ; or waste 
this fine might of our proper manhood, as 
the vessels in our river blow off their steam, 
vexing everybody near them with the clamor, 
and then just swinging to the dock. 

The power to be angry abides in you and 
me for a far nobler end than that. We also 
must "ride on the whirlwind, and direct the 
storm," when such occasions rise in our life. 



I82 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

I know of nothing greater in its own true 
place than a right anger, as I know of few 
things more paltry and poor in a man than 
to be forever getting angry. 

And this lesson so many of us have to 
learn, we must teach to our children when 
they come to us, — that there is no harm in 
a high temper if they will keep it for noble 
uses, for it will be a very grand factor then 
in the sum of their life. Because it is a 
great mistake to leave our children ignorant 
touching the greatness and worth of this gift, 
and to be forever harping, as some do, on its 
meanness ; or to try to break their temper, 
as we say, instead of keeping it whole and 
sound for the sterner demands of their life. 
You will see an indignation now and then in 
a well-nurtured boy, equal in its way to any 
thing you shall find in Knox or Luther, — 
beautiful and generous, and replete with self- 
abnegation ; and when we see that, we should 
be glad for it to tears. For to strike fire 



A NOBLE ANGER 183 

and blaze out over cowardice, falsehood, or 
cruelty, is still more beautiful in them than 
it can be in us, because it is fresher from 
the deeps of a divine revolt, more like the 
anger of the angels we see in the old pic- 
tures, but do not see in the new, now that 
even genius seems to have lost track of this 
most noble passion. 

On my second head of a true and noble 
anger, this is to be said, as the conclusion 
of the whole matter : that it is something 
we should neither be ashamed nor afraid of. 
It is the constriction and revolt of the heart 
against that which no true man should tol- 
erate, or woman. We all know what worth 
there is in a gentle pity and charity, and 
how divine these endowments are ; but this is 
also divine. The most godlike nature which 
ever wore the garb of the flesh was angry on 
true occasion, and platted a whip of whip- 
cord, and drove out the beasts, and over- 
turned the tables of the money-changers in 



l84 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

the temple, saying, " My Father's house is 
called a house of prayer, but ye have made 
it a den of thieves." And the great prophets 
grew angry when they must, and the saints, 
because this was the only way open to them 
there and then through which they could 
smite the evil things that degrade and deform 
our life. Nor must we imagine such a 
temper is not in accord with the gentlest 
pity and charity we can nourish in our hearts, 
because it may be through the very perfec- 
tion of this high grace in us that we say 
our mighty word, or strike our mighty stroke. 
What manhood is there in me worth the 
name, if I feel no strong anger over the 
things I hear and read about the ruin of 
innocent girls, yes, and boys too, the rob- 
bing of widows and orphans, and a thousand 
things equally of kin to the Devil and his 
angels .? It is as natural to burn and flame 
out in anger over such things as it is to see, 
and as good as it is to pray, — yes, and to 



A NOBLE ANGER 185 

hold in durance Paul's gentle suggestion that 
you shall not let the sun go down on your 
wrath, until you see how the account stands ; 
because the reason for such a spirit may be 
more imperious to-morrow than it is to-day, 
and then I had better betake myself to the 
Arctic Circle, where I can have sun-up for 
half a year, than not have it out with the 
evil thing once for all. 

And I say no word to you I would not 
take home, as you will have seen, to myself. 
People say sometimes a minister should 
never get angry. They say it because they 
imagine that to give way to this spirit is 
always to be on the doubtful side. I have 
been a long time in the ministry now, and 
have only this to say, that a minister must 
wax angry now and then, or he is no proper 
man, and he loses neither dignity nor power 
through this strong passion, but may win 
both ; while " a linked sweetness, long drawn 
out," which will never permit him to give 



i86 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

way to the great constriction, may gender 
the suspicion that something has been left 
out in the making of such a man, or he has 
lost it as the man lost the talent he hid 
away in a napkin. He must not and will 
not care much about his own private mat- 
ters. We are none of us of such moment as 
to warrant much outlay of this splendid treas- 
ure on ourselves. But when a great principle 
comes into peril, or a far-reaching duty con- 
fronts us, and we find that gentle words and 
ways are of no more use than a feather is 
against an elephant, then we may be angry. 
I may, or you may, summon all the forces to 
the battle with falsehood, wrong, cruelty, evil 
deeds or loathsome, and become each in our 
degree the synonyme of an angry angel. We 
do not lose our temper then, we find it ; and 
it is neither a sin nor a shame. Once and 
again in our lifetime, no matter what may be 
our calling, things will be done as mean and 
base as if a brute should strike our mother 



A NOBLE ANGER 187 

on the breast. Humanity is wronged past all 
bearing, justice and truth are insulted by 
their altars, purity is dragged down from its 
throne. Then our anger burns in us like a 
fire, and we strike out, and strike home. It 
is kept for these supreme uses, and must be. 
We must not get out our artillery to kill 
flies. Your noble man is a miser of his 
anger ; only your spendthrift fritters it away. 
"Lord," the good Welshman prayed, "if our 
hearts are too hard, do thou soften them ; 
and if they are too soft, do thou harden 
them by thy grace." So we may pray for a 
noble anger as the crown, in its true time 
and place, of all gentleness and goodness, 
and the love that never fails. 



XI 

itharles anb Tflary Lamb 

A True Story 

T WANT to say something to you this 
evening about the life of Charles Lamb ; 
and to begin by saying, that such a theme 
must be its own apology to those who only 
know the man through a few jests everybody 
repeats, but which are by no means of the 
deep and searching sort Hazlitt had in his 
mind when he said, '* Lamb's jests scald like 
tears." These jestlings, as he would have 
called them, were the first thing I heard or 
read from him in my youth, and might have 
been the last had not a gentleman, whose 
sight was failing, asked me to read for him 
as I found the time ; and one of the books 
he loved best was the "Essays of Elia." So 
i88 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 1S9 

I read the essays, I remember, with no 
idea at all of their sweet and subtle charm, 
and wondered how any man could care for 
such things as those. But two or three 
years after I had closed the book forever, as 
I thought, some seeds it had sown began to 
quicken in my mind, from here and there an 
essay, and especially those on ''Chimney- 
Sweeps " and the " Decay of Beggars," and 
made me long to see the book again, after 
it had vanished with its owner, I knew not 
where. And so when I began to rise in the 
world, and was earning as much as eight 
dollars a month and ''found," about the first 
money I could spare went for a copy of 
" Elia," which is now in a farmhouse away 
out in Colorado ; and from that time " Elia " 
has been one of my choicest companions, 
and so dear to me that I can quite under- 
stand the feeling of as honest and good a 
man as I ever knew, who said to me once, 
" I love ' Elia ' so well, that I feel tempted 



190 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

to carry off every copy I lay my hands on." 
I would not like to say quite so much as 
that about my own feeling, and indeed do 
not think I can love ** Elia " so well as my 
good old friend does ; for I notice my own 
temptation seldom strays beyond the desire 
to borrow every copy I find in the hands 
of my friends, and never take it home 
again. 

But loving the book so well as this even, 
you will not wonder that one should want to 
know all about the author, and find out, as 
near as may be, how that answers to the 
picture he draws of himself in these essays. 
For you are presently aware, as you read 
them, that the man is holding what one 
might call an experience-meeting with you, 
and that no word comes out of his heart 
blended with laughter and tears, which has 
not gone into it first through some experi- 
ence as close as life and death. And I 
found this to be the truth when I came to 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB IQI 

read the story of his life. Here was the 
man Charles Lamb, behind the mask of Elia, 
not unclothed but clothed upon. A man of 
sorrows, and acquainted with grief ; called 
to take the noblest part in as deep and sad 
a tragedy as was ever done, and failing in 
no line or accent from the moment when the 
curtain rises to the time it is rung down 
by the hand of death. A man with a few 
faults, and more failings he could confess to 
with as deep a contrition as you will find 
in the Psalms of David. A warning, if you 
will, as Burns was ; but, like Burns, also a 
grand and sweet ensample, and whose very 
vices, as one said who knew and loved him, 
were nobler than some men's virtues. The 
man one thinks of in reading how Luther 
said once to his friend, *' Go get drunk, and 
then you can tell me what such sins mean 
when you have felt their teeth in your soul;" 
and he of whom Landor sung when he was 
dead, — 



192 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

'•Cordial old man, what youth was in thy years, 
What wisdom in thy levity, what truth 
In every utterance of that purest soul ! 
Few are the spirits of the glorified, 
I'd spring to earlier, at the gate of heaven." 

Charles Lamb died in 1834, as the year 
was closing, at Edmonton by London, a place 
known to you and me through the diverting 
history of John Gilpin. And, if we could 
have gone there in the fall of that year, 
the chances are, we should have seen Mr. 
Lamb, as the neighbors called him, wandering 
along the lanes while the leaves were turning 
brown on the trees, and the mists were fall- 
ing far and wide ; for the splendid pillars of 
golden fire our maples rear against the azure 
here, are not seen in the mother-land, and if 
you had the maples there, you would not 
have the azure in which ours are framed. 

A man who looks feeble before his time, 
for he is not yet threescore ; and with that 
pathetic student's stoop in the shoulders, he 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 193 

has not caught, I think, from bending over 
the old folios which were so dear to him, 
but from bending over the great ledgers, 
rather, in the India House, for thirty-three 
years. He called these his "works," these 
vast folios of profit and loss ; and a friend 
of mine told me how he went to look at 
these ledgers a great many years ago, which 
were shown him with a fine courtesy, and 
how the porter who took them down for him, 
and dusted them, said, "We have had gentle- 
men from America before, sir, who wanted 
to see these ledgers, so you will excuse me, 
sir, for asking if Mr. Lamb was an Ameri- 
can ? " 

A short and slender person you would have 
seen in those lanes, with what Thomas Hood 
called a pair of immaterial legs ; a head of 
wonderful beauty, if you could see it bare, 
well set on the bent shoulders, with black 
curly hair in plenty, threaded through with 
gray ; eyes of a soft brown, like that you 



194 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

see in some gentle animals, but not quite 
of the same color, — odd eyes, you would call 
them ; and a face of the finest Hebrew type 
rather than the Saxon. "But who shall de- 
scribe his face," an old friend says, " or 
catch its quivering sweetness ? Deep thought, 
shot through with humor, and lines of suf- 
fering wreathed with mirth." He would be 
dressed in black, also, of an old fashion, 
though the time was when he favored a 
decent gray ; and when a friend asked him 
once why he wore such queer old clothes, 
he answered very simply, *' Because they are 
all I have, my boy." 

He would have a dog with him, also ; a 
creature which answered, or rather did nof 
answer, to the name of Dash, and would rush 
away wherever his wayward fancy led him, 
while he who should have been his master 
would stand still in deep dismay, calling to 
him, fearing he would get lost, and resolving 
to teach him better manners ; only when the 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 195 

rogue did return in an hour or so, his victim 
would be so glad he could not bear even to 
scold him, and so he had to send him away at 
last in sheer despair. So the gentle old man 
would walk about the lanes in those days, 
with Dash to torment him ; turn in, perhaps, 
to the Bell, where John Gilpin should have 
dined, for a glass of ale ; and then go home 
to the lodgings where he lived with his sister. 
This sister depended on her brother so 
that he said very tenderly to her one day 
when he came home, '* You must die first, 
Mary ; " and she answered with a cheerful 
little laugh, "Yes, Charles, I must die first." 
But on a day not long after, as I make out, 
he fell, as he was walking alone, and was 
much bruised and shaken. He had said in 
a letter, not very long before, " God help me 
when I come to put off these snug relations, 
and get abroad in the world to come." And 
long before, "a new state of things staggers 
me. Sun, sky, and breeze, solitary walks and 



19^ TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

summer holidays, the greenness of fields, and 
the delicious juices of meats and fishes, 
society and its good cheer, candle-light and 
fireside conversations, and innocent vanities 
and jests, and irony itself, — do we lose 
these with life ? Can a ghost laugh, or shake 
his gaunt sides ? And you, my folios, must 
I part with you ? Must knowledge come to 
me, if it comes at all, by some awkward turn 
of intuition, and no longer by this familiar 
process of reading ? Shall I enjoy friend- 
ship there, wanting the smiles and the faces 
I know, and the sweet assurance of a look ? " 
So he lived, this gentle and most sensitive 
spirit, all his life subject to bondage and the 
fear of death, as we have known others 
live of his noble and delicate mould. But 
after he got his hurt he did not know what 
had befallen him, and was only dreaming 
pleasant dreams of old friends and of some 
little festival he had in his mind ; and so he 
passed away, and did not see death, for God 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 197 

took him, while the sister who was to have 
gone first survived him almost twelve years. 

He was born in London, as your fathers 
were blowing at the fires which flamed up at 
Lexington and on Bunker Hill. 

His father was a lawyer's clerk in the 
Temple, where the boy passed the first seven 
years of his life close to the great tides 
that set in, as he tells us, from the east and 
west, in the very heart of the great city he 
came to love so well that he told Wordsworth 
once his mountains and lakes might hang for 
all he cared, and, when at last he went to 
look at them, found he was composing his 
mmd and staying his heart, not at all on 
their glory and beauty, but on a famous ham 
and beef shop he knew of in the Strand. 

He has drawn a portrait of his father as 
a man of ''an incorruptible and losing hon- 
esty," and not only clerk to the old lawyer, 
but his good servant, dresser, friend, guide, 
stop-watch, and treasurer. The liveliest little 



198 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

fellow breathing, he says, with a face as gay 
as Garrick's ; a man Isaac Walton would 
have loved to go with a-fishing, and clever 
with his hands though he was small. For 
once when he saw a man of quality, so-called, 
insulting a woman, and came to her rescue, 
and the brute drew his sword on him, the 
little fellow wrenched the sword out of his 
hand, and mauled him soundly with the 
hilt. 

They were very poor, these Lambs ; and 
the undercurrent of rumor, which may go 
for what it is worth, is, that the children 
were neglected. But no word of this- comes 
from Lamb, like those we have from another 
fine humorist, who shames himself and his 
genius by telling the story of his own hard 
lot as a child, and then draws the portrait 
of his father in Micawber very much after 
the manner of one in the Scriptures who 
mocked at his father's weakness and shame. 
He went to a sort of charity-school for his 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 199 

education, Christ's Hospital, so called, a place 
in those days, of the old brutal British type, 
where they never spared the rod to spoil 
the child ; staid there seven years, learning 
what they used to call the humanities ; and 
had for his dear friends and companions Col- 
eridge and Jem White, noble boys both of 
them, and dear friends all their lives. Jem 
wrote a book when he grew to be a man, 
which Lamb always said was full of genius. 
Yet nobody would buy it, or read it if they 
had even a dictionary to read instead. But 
Lamb could never understand why the whole 
world of London did not rush right away to 
buy that book ; and whenever he found a 
copy in after-years on an old book-stall would 
buy it for sixpence, — all the man had the 
heart to ask, — and give it to some friend in 
the hope of making one convert at the least 
to the genius and grace of his old friend 
Jem White. 

Coleridge, the inspired charity-boy as he 



200 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

calls him, had the wine in him which needs 
no bush, and was dear to his heart as Jona- 
than was to David's. He says, to be sure, 
that Coleridge taught him all the corruption 
he ever knew which had not come by nature, 
likens him to an archangel a little damaged, 
and often wreaks on him the humor that 
scalds like tears. Still their love to the end 
was the fair rose which holds no worm i' the 
bud, but is perfect and entire. 

When Lamb was about fourteen, they could 
afford to keep him at the school no longer : 
so he had to turn out, and help make the 
living, for the years had brought no release 
from the bitter pinch of poverty. There was 
a brother much older than Charles, who was 
doing well in the world and had only himself 
to care for; so he only cared for himself, 
being a man of fine tastes, and left the fam- 
ily to its doom. So he found work to do, 
the boy of fourteen, and became presently 
the head of the household, and its staff and 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 20l 

stay. Then in the course of time he saw the 
maid he could dream of as his wife, and 
worship from afar until it should please God 
to open the way to his great desire. And 
then, when he was just coming of age, a 
great tragedy opened, and changed the whole 
plan and purpose of his life. 

They were living in a poor little place, to 
which they had moved for poverty's sake, 
— the old father who was passing into his 
second childhood, the mother who was an 
invalid, and helpless also, and the sister Mary 
who was ten years older than Charles. Mary 
was so burdened with the care and sorrow 
of it all, that one day, in a sudden fit of 
insanity, she clutched a knife, and, before 
the brother could reach her, stabbed her 
mother to the heart, wounded the poor old 
father also, and then was secured at a great 
risk of the brother's own life. It was in- 
sanity, the jury said at once at the inquest ; 
,^nd they knew this better than the jury, for 



202 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

Lamb himself had been touched by it not 
long before, and shut up in an asylum. So 
Mary was sent there for her life, if it must 
be so but it was found presently, that these 
fits were fitful, coming and going with a cer- 
tain premonition, when you came to under- 
stand them ; and so she need not stay there, 
if those to whom she belonged would take 
her home and take care of her. The elder 
brother, who was thirty or so then, and well- 
to-do, with no one to care for still but him- 
self, stood aloof. The youth rising toward 
twenty-one, and earning about a hundred 
pounds a year, stepped quietly to the front, 
and said, " I will take care of my sister. 
Let me have her home." So she came home; 
and the boy turned away from the shy, sweet 
dream of Alice, which had nestled in his 
heart, and took up the burden he was to 
bear for thirty-eight years to come, and wrote 
presently to a friend, *' If Mary and the rest 
of us cannot live on what we have, we 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 203 

deserve to burn at a slow fire ; and I almost 
would sooner do that than let her go back 
to the asylum." 

So they lived on what they had, until more 
came through the young man's steady striv- 
ing, and the better berth he got in that 
India House. For he says, " I am jealous of 
human helps and leaning-places ; and small 
treasures, as good John Woolman hath it, are 
enough to a contented mind." He burned 
the journal he had kept about his sweet shy 
love, and the poems he had written to his 
divinity but had never sent. The poor old 
man, his father, needed to be amused ; and 
so he gave up the company of Coleridge of 
evenings, to amuse him, — the choicest com- 
pany to Lamb in all the world ; yet did not 
think it was a great thing to do, for this 
poor old dotard was his father, ''And in- 
deed," the young man says when he begins 
to be a bit cheerful again, '' the wind is 
tempered beautifully to the shorn Lambs." 



204 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

And twenty years after this, he says, 
speaking of Mary and himself, "We two 
house together, old bachelor and old maid, 
in a sort of double singleness ; while I, for 
one, find no disposition to go out upon the 
mountains with the king's rash offspring, to 
bewail my celibacy. And we agree very well, 
too ; but once when I spoke to her in a 
kinder voice than usual, she burst into tears, 
and said I was much altered (for the worse). 
I read my old Burton, and she reads stories 
with plenty of life in them, good and bad. 
She hath also been much cast among free- 
thinkers ; but that which was good and ven- 
erable to her in her childhood, she loves 
still, and will play no tricks with her under- 
standing or her heart." 

So it came to pass, when the old father 
and Hester the servant were dead, and they 
were left alone, that the cross would change 
now and then into a crown, and joy take 
the place of the deep sorrow, which indeed 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 205 

was hidden away by those who knew of it 
and loved them, and was never mentioned 
again until they were both dead. Mary 
Lamb also was a woman of rare and beau- 
tiful gifts. Hazlitt says she was the only 
woman he ever met who knew how to reason ; 
but Hazlitt's experience of women was not 
fortunate. Wordsworth, with a finer ear, says, 
"I dwell not only on her genius, but on her 
rare delicacy and refinement." 

They kept house together, and knew how 
to do this on a little, until more came to 
hand, as I said ; and Mary knew what her 
brother loved to eat, and how he liked to 
have it done. And Coleridge — the archangel 
more than somewhat damaged by this time 
— clung to the brother and the sister, and 
they to him ; so did Jem White, whose death, 
Lamb says, took half the fun out of the 
world and the sunshine. George Dyer also, 
simple as a child, to whom Lamb once whis- 
pered the great secret that as likely a man 



206 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

as the prince-regent was the author of the 
Waverley stories, and George went and told 
Leigh Hunt also as a great secret ; for in 
these freaks of humor, Lamb, who was the 
very soul of truth and honor, used to say, " I 
am not a matter of f-fact man, but a matter 
of 1-lie man," and argued once that the truth 
was too good to be thrown away on every- 
body. And Bowles was their dear friend, 
who presented a Bible once to another friend 
with the inscription, "From the author, with 
his kind regards." And a schoolmaster, of 
whose school Lamb took charge once when 
the pedagogue had to go away and did not 
know what in the world he should do for 
a teacher ; Lamb did not know what he 
should do as a teacher when he had got into 
the desk, so he gave the boys a whole holi- 
day to their vast delight. And an artist who 
had to get out a series of portraits of great 
admirals for a magazine, but could not afford 
to hire a sitter ; so Lamb sat for the whole 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 207 

lot, which are still to be found with faces 
more or less of the Hebrew type. And a 
poor fellow to whom Lamb said with a blush, 
when he was getting to be easy about 
money, '' Do you know, my boy, I have 
made my will, and put you down for so 
much, so I might just as well pay it now." 
Barry Cornwall also, a young man then, and 
not over well-to-do, was very dear to him. 
He was looking much cast down one day ; 
and Lamb, suspecting it was money, or rather 
the lack of it, which troubled him, said, 
"Barry, my desk is all a maze of things I 
don't want, and there's a hundred pounds 
among 'em. Do take it, my boy, and relieve 
me of the care." 

All the men he met, who had a queer 
twist in life or mind or fortune, went into 
his heart, and staid there ; and all the men 
he heard or read of, no one else would en- 
tertain with so much as the crumbs of their 
sympathy. He had a good word for Judas 



208 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

Iscariot, and pity for the man in the great 
sermon who built his house upon the sand, 
and for the five foolish virgins ; but did not 
care much for the man who built his house 
on the rock, because it was clear he knew 
how to take care of himself, or for the five 
wise virgins who went in merrily to the 
supper, and left their companions weeping 
outside in the dark ; while he was not quite 
clear that there was not a certain grain of 
nobility in Guy Faux that arch-traitor who 
would have blown up king, lords, and com- 
mons at one stroke; and had great pity also 
for a man he read of in the papers, who was 
taken up for sheep-stealing, because the 
sheep was taken too, and so the poor man 
lost his first and last chance at a mutton-pie. 
And Lamb imagined, moreover, what a fearful 
thing it would be, if, when his grace of Clar- 
ence had made his choice to be drowned in 
a butt of malmsey, it should not turn out to 
be that after all, but some other sort of wine. 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 209 

One who was his friend and is ours sings : 

"There is no music in the life 

That sounds with empty laughter wholly; 
There's not a string attuned to mirth, 
But has its chord in melancholy." 

Well, this is the secret of the humor which 
scalds like tears. The wind was tempered to 
the shorn Lambs, but now and then it smote 
them very sore. Mary was never cured from 
that awful threat of insanity which went and 
came, while the shadow staid always on 
their house and their life. So he could not 
leave her when he would take a holiday ; it 
was so shameful, he said, to leave her, and 
go off and enjoy himself alone. So Mary 
would pack her trunk, and go with him, and 
always packed her strait-waistcoat to be ready 
for what might happen. And if they were 
at home they knew when the shadows began 
to deepen; and, like those children in the 
story we have all wept over in our day, it 
would befall, that 



210 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

" When they saw the darksome night, 
They sat them down and cried." 

Then the brother would busk himself up 
bravely in his best, put on airs as of one 
who was on pleasure bent, and ask for a holi- 
day; and I think they were delicate with him, 
and wise, and asked no questions. Then he 
would go home to Mary, and friends say they 
have met them stealing along by-paths toward 
the asylum, hand in hand, and weeping both 
of them, while Charles would be carrying the 
strait-jacket, and sometimes Mary would urge 
him to a run on those small immaterial legs, 
for she was aware that it might be mid- 
night madness in a few moments, and so they 
would come to the doors quite out of breath. 
Then Mary would get well again, come home, 
and begin her housekeeping as if nothing 
had befallen. And in the Temple once, when 
they had taken rooms there, they lighted on 
a bit of rare good fortune Lamb would enjoy 
above all men. It was a small place and 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 2ll 

cheap ; and mousing round they found a bhnd 
door locked fast, managed to open the door, 
and then found some rooms beyond, nobody 
had ever heard of or suspected, took possess 
sion of these also, and so lived in great state, 
and were never able to pay any rent for 
them because they could not find any land- 
lord to take it. 

This is the story of Charles and Mary 
Lamb, until at last on a day we see the old 
man in the lanes by Edmonton with his dog 
Dash, and then sitting by the fire of an 
evening, listening to his old host who always 
told the same old story of the way he rode 
into Salisbury in his rash youth on a mad 
horse; as grand and touching a story — not 
as I tell it, but as the brother and sister 
lived it — as was ever written with a pen; 
the story of the boy and man, — 

" Whom neither shape of danger could dismay, 
Nor dream of tender happiness betray ; 
Who, doomed to walk in company with pain, 
Turned the necessity to glorious gain." 



212 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

I shall say something to you on another 
evening about good books : I name Charles 
Lamb's essays and letters, and the story of 
his life, now, among the best. You may not 
be of my mind at once, about the essays, as 
I was not of my friend's mind. But if once 
you catch his secret, and wander with him 
wherever the humor takes him, watching the 
life he touches with a sympathy something 
like his own, a life which never breaks forth 
into the bluff and hearty freedom you find 
here and there in Shakspeare, when laughter 
is lord of the day ; and is never " dipped in 
baths of hissing tears, or riven with the shocks 
of doom," for this would be barking too near 
his own experience, but is replete with quaint 
humor and wisdom, deep as the deepness of 
life, — if you can do this, you will read 
Charles Lamb to your heart's delight ; not 
now in your youth alone, but in your old 



XII 

iEh$ iCompanionship of 16006 Boohs 

Rev. X. 8-11 

T HAVE felt it would be a good thing 
to say a word now about the companion- 
ship of good books, in the hope that it may 
be of some special worth to the young men 
and women who would love to win compan- 
ions and friends that will never desert them 
in any trouble, while they will deepen and 
sweeten all their joys. 

There is a lovely touch in a recent life of 
Southey, who, of all men in his time, was 
a lover of good books. How, in his old age, 
the splendid brain, which had done so much 
good work, gave way, and he could read no 
more ; but the writer says he would still walk 
about his library, and lay his hand on those 

213 



214 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

that were dearest to him, one by one, as 
you would lay yours on the shoulder of a 
lifelong friend. 

They were all in a mist to him now ; he 
could see them no more with the old clear 
vision ; but he knew they were there, and 
loved them; and they could speak to him 
no more in the old sweet fashion, but there 
was some echo in them still of the lifelong 
joy. And the good scholar's story may be 
yours and mine. We win these good com- 
panions and friends, and it is no fault of 
theirs if our power to commune with them 
fails ; they are always the same, and though 
every other friend deserts us, yet will not 
they. 

Mrs. Browning says we never call the child 
fatherless who has God and his mother; and 
I would never call the man friendless who 
has God and good books. I went down into 
the Yorkshire wolds the other summer, where 
Sydney Smith lived once, who is one of these 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 215 

friends of mine. I did not find him there, 
and found it hard to imagine how he could 
Hve there so long and still stay so sunny- 
hearted ; but he was waiting my return home, 
radiant as ever with wit and wisdom. I 
went to Coleridge's grave once on Highgate 
Hill. He is not there, he is risen ; and 
I see him and commune with him whenever 
the humor takes me. I sat in Shakspeare's 
chair in Stratford upon Avon, so they said, 
and read the only letter we know of ever 
addressed to him, — a letter from a man who 
wanted to borrow money ; so curiously do 
the old times chime in with the new, — and 
wandered over the pleasant leas to Shottery, 
where he found his wife, alas 1 And it was 
all as lovely as a midsummer night's dream, 
but I could not make the mighty master live 
in Stratford as he lives with me. 

So I might name a little host of these 
companions and friends I have been able in 
all these years to gather about me, — poets, 



2l6 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

philosophers, essayists, story-tellers, sermon- 
makers, theologians, and saints. I cannot 
stop to name them all, but there they are, 
always waiting for me, in that spiritual body 
we call a book. Isaac Walton says, "I go 
a-fishing," and then I say I go too ; I go 
with Wordsworth also on the "Excursion,** 
and to Bolton, familiar to me from my child- 
hood, to watch the White Doe. It is enough 
on this head. My companions and friends 
may be yours also, and fill your life with the 
pleasantness and profit which have come to 
mine. 

Nor do I find it very hard to see how 
such books as I have in my mind should 
come to be counted among our best treas- 
ures, when we note how they come to us, 
and at what a cost. Men and women come 
into this world of ours with the supreme 
gift in them, it may be, we call genius, and 
begin at length to write these books. If you 
should ask them how it was done, the great- 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 217 

est and best of them would not be able to 
tell you. The old Hebrew prophets, when 
they have a great and moving word to say, 
are apt to begin with, ''Thus saith the Lord," 
because they feel sure it is not said by 
them so much as through them ; and this, I 
imagine, must be the feeling of any man or 
woman of a true genius when they do their 
great things. They are not their own mas- 
ters ; they are *'all possessed," as we say, 
sometimes, and must write the poem or the 
chapter because they cannot help it. 

Then there is another truth touching what 
they do. They have been watching this world 
and life of ours with the seer's eyes ; so 
while we see only what lies on the surface, 
possibly, they see what lies away down within 
the heart of things, and every thing goes 
into the quick of their life, — all sights, all 
sounds, all events, all fortunes, — and give 
them in turn the keenest delight or misery. 
These seem to me to be the conditions of 



2l8 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

the purest genius ; and when the true time 
comes, in which they can no more help them- 
selves, shall I say, than the lightning can 
help its flash, the power possesses them 
we call inspiration, and they pour out the 
treasure they have gathered, into their book. 
So the books come to us which hold the 
heart captive, and so these have come to 
me, my choicest companions and friends. It 
is a divine passion in them to sing their 
song, to tell their story, or to open their 
heart to us in some other noble way, which 
lies within all the great books I ever read or 
heard of. This is the choicest wine of their 
life, the gold made fine in the fires of their 
genius, — the report they make to us of what 
they have seen, we cannot see ; and heard, 
we cannot hear. These are the books also, 
that have to bide their time before they can 
reveal their finest worth, like the wine we 
hear of in the cellars of kings and million- 
naires, which grows more precious through 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 219 

the lapse of the years ; and yet not through 
the years alone, because they will turn your 
poorer vintage to mere vinegar, but because 
the secret lies in the genius of the grape. 
Such, as I think of it, is the genesis of the 
greatest and best books I would commend for 
your choicest companionship, — books Charles 
Lamb thought might be best read after you 
had asked a blessing, as you do on some 
rare and beautiful family festival. 

Then I think we should always bring some 
such spirit to the reading of these books 
as their authors brought to the writing, or 
we shall miss their finest secret and sweetest 
satisfaction. My reading must not be so 
much work to be done, for the sake of so 
much worth, when I commune with these 
choice companions and friends. They have 
brought me the best there was in their mind 
and heart, and I must bring them the best 
there is in mine. I may devour what they 
bring me greedily, if it happens to suit my 



220 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

taste, and think I have got all the good of 
it ; but no such spirit in the reader will ever 
find the true worth of a good and great 
book. Old readers know this as we know 
our paternoster. Your mind needs to be as 
purely alive to read, as my author's was to 
write ; and you must take far more time, it 
may be, to exhaust such books, than the 
writers took to fill them. I speak only of 
the best and finest now, not of those you 
can read as you crack a nut, and then tost 
them aside. There are plenty of these, but I 
say the best and choicest reading must cos 
about what it comes to. No man can K 
dead-headed on this line of the best; and if 
he tries, the line will not be responsible for 
damages. 

But here again I must slip in a caution. 
There are books which seem as sweet as 
honey to the taste, we can read with an 
ever-growing appetite, and think we thrive 
on them ; yet such reading shall be like 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 221 

those subtle poisons the young peasants 
take, as you may have heard, in some parts 
of Austria, to make them look plump and 
rosy ; but as they have always to make the 
drug a little stronger, or it will lose its 
virtue, the result is that they either die 
suddenly of an overdose, or grow old and 
haggard before they come to their prime. 

There are other books, again, that stimu- 
late you just as wines do, of which you can 
sip slowly, feeling the glow and glamour of 
them, to be aware by and by that you want 
something which holds a fiercer fire, and will 
have it. Well, you get it; and the result 
may be a delirium tremens of the spirit, sad 
and woful as that of the body, and with a 
still more frightful ending. 

And there are books, again, we can read 
as men take opium. They seem to relieve the 
pam, or shut out the desolation, and to bring 
visions which seem like those of heaven : 
only the woe which follows such reading is 



222 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

greater than that you would stay. Now, to 
read books like these again and again, and 
make them your companions and friends, is 
one sure way toward the pit. It is far worse 
than just to devour and have done with 
them, if you will insist on eating of the 
tree of the knowledge of good and evil ; 
because there is a hope, if you just devour 
them, that the things will turn you so sick 
of soul as to work their own cure ; but in 
a slow, leisurely, lingering assimilation of such 
poison, there is time for it to find the 
minutest channels and choicest fibre of your 
life. 

On the other hand, there are books we 
may devour in any quantity, that will do no 
harm except to take up our time, and prompt 
the question, Will a man fill himself with the 
east wind.? Books which are very much as 
when our children pop their corn, and dash 
it over with a little sugar; books which are 
only what the sea-foam is to the sea; the 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 223 

beaten syllabub of book-nurture, of which 
no harm can come to us save the reflection 
that naught to naught can never make the 
least fraction of one. Still I slip in a saving 
clause, also, with my caution, to say : There 
is such a wide difference in this human 
nature of ours, that, except when we touch 
the best and worst books, it is neither easy 
nor safe to lay down dogmas for reading, and 
say what you must or must not do. I have 
known a man to whom sweet milk was like 
poison ; another, who could not touch meat ; 
and still another, to whose curious constitu- 
tion an egg was like a scorpion. It is only 
saying that in books, also, one man's meat 
may be another man's poison. But with these 
cautions, I come now to what I take to be a 
fair criterion, by which I can judge for myself 
what books may be bad for me to read, and 
then, what I may take to my heart for dear 
companions and friends. 

If, when I read a book about God, I find 



224 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

it has put Him farther from me than He 
was before ; or about man, that it has put 
me farther from him ; or about this world I 
live in, that my book has shaken down on 
it a new look of desolation, turning it into 
a sort of desert ; or about life, that it has 
made life seem less worth living; or about 
moral principles, that they are not so clear 
and strong in my heart as they were when 
this man began to open his mind to me : 
then I know, that on any of these cardinal 
things in our human life, — my relation to 
God, to my fellow-man, to the world I live 
in, and to the great moral principles on which 
all things rest and turn, — to me, this is not 
a good book. It may chime in with some 
appetite I have, and be as sweet as honey to 
my taste ; but it is not my book. Or, it may 
be food for another. I cannot dogmatize 
here. I only know this : how in these great 
first things, if the book I read touches them 
at all, it shall touch them for my help and 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 225 

uplifting, or else I must toss the book aside, 
and have done with it. I companion only 
with those that can do this for me ; the 
grain and grist of my reading must be 
sound and healthful. Here I must be a little 
selfish, and see that I get so much good 
by so much reading. I want bread, milk, 
meat : I do not want brandy or opium or 
hasheesh. 

Or, again, let the book touch, as so many 
do, the powers and passions of our common 
human nature, and as I read let me find that 
the book tends to rouse these good servants 
but bad masters, my passions, and to give 
them a certain mastery over my principles, 
or in the relations of our life to make these 
relations less sweet and true between the 
man and woman, and start questions which, 
in their so-called solution, are so often only 
the skeleton-keys to pick the safeguards of 
virtue, rather than the strong and sure bolts 
to keep them, — then these are not good 



226 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

books for me, or wholesome companions and 
friends. 

And those are not good books for the 
youth of our Repubhc, which bemoan the 
advancing and opening age as less hopeful 
and happy than those that are gone, or fill 
me with splendid dreams of what I will do 
some day, but paralyze my hand and heart 
toward the humble striving of this day in 
this year of our Lord. Milton says I must 
" have a vigilant eye how books bemean 
themselves, and if they are proven evil I must 
imprison them, and do sharp justice on them 
as malefactors. For books are not dead 
things, but contain a potency of life as active 
as that soul-progeny they are." 

So it follows, that, in taking good and 
noble books to my heart, these shadows so 
far must help me toward the light. Common 
fame can do something to guide me in my 
reading, but not much. Criticism can do 
something also ; and it is a comfortable doc- 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 227 

trine a dear friend of mine holds, that if you 
want to find the last good book you must 
not be over-troubled, you are sure to hear of 
it or find it in your hand within a year. 
These things may all help us, — common fame, 
criticism, and the good-will of those who are 
watching for the best, and find no finer 
pleasure than in telling me of some happy 
"find." But the proof of the book lies still 
in the reading. If it be in religion, and 
brings God nearer to my heart and life ; if it 
be in humanity, and brings me nearer to the 
world's heart and life ; if it be in science 
or philosophy, and makes this world glow to 
me with a new and nobler grace ; if it be 
a poem, or a story, a book of adventure, or 
history, or of biography, and I feel it makes 
me more a man, more sincere and trusty 
and true, — then no matter who wrote it, or 
what men say about it, that is a good book 
for niCy and may become one of those com- 
panions I want to keep all my life, and love. 



228 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

So it is no superstition, but a clear human 
instinct, which makes our Bible what it is to 
us and has been so long, — the great divine 
book of the world. Let our theories of in- 
spiration be what they may, this is the book 
in which prophets and apostles, poets and 
psalmists, saints and martyrs, and the great 
Divine Teacher have told us what lay deepest 
in their heart. The things are there they 
caught fresh from heaven, the things that 
stormed them surging through their souls in 
mighty tides, or entranced them by their 
matchless music, and the things they fought 
for and suffered for, and the man is there 
within the Word. But to get at the heart 
of this book, of all the books I know of, 
we must not rush through the chapters as if 
we were eating a railroad dinner. We must 
watch and wait for its meanings to come out 
and shine on the sorrows and joys, the per- 
plexities and the confidences, which are one 
with the pangs of which they were born. 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 229 

" It is the one book," Thomas Carlyle says, 
'' in which, for thousands of years, the spirit of 
man has found light and nourishment, and an 
interpreting response to whatever was deep- 
est in his own nature." I think he is right, 
and that the Book rests on no man's say-so, 
but on its own wonderful worth to man ; and 
so I count it first among those I would make 
my own dear companions and friends. 

May I not say one word, as I close, about 
novels and novel-reading, because this has 
come to be a grave question for young men 
and women to ponder who would only read 
the best books .? I have always loved to read 
a good bright story, and do still. And John 
Stuart Mill says, " It is not what our youth 
can repeat by rote, but what they have 
learned to love and admire, which forms the 
character;" and commends the stories that 
fill the imagination in our early days with 
pictures of heroic men and women as good 
for this good purpose. So they are ; and if 



230 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

I may mention one author in particular, the 
stories of Sir Walter Scott seem to me to 
stand first. Bishop Stanley, father of the 
good Dean, says, "They have won the right 
to stand on the same shelf with Shak- 
speare," and I agree again with the bishop. 
I read a round dozen of these stories still 
year by year, with all the old delight ; and 
not for the sake of knights like Ivanhoe, 
and ladies like a dozen one could name, but 
more for the sake of his peasants and serfs 
and beggars who grow noble as he touches 
them with his magic wand. I dwell on these 
stories because they dwell in me. Sydney 
Smith, who loved a good story, says, "The 
main question in a novel is : Does it amuse 
you t " I think we should look for more 
than that, as we should in an amusing com- 
panion who would still make black white or 
a sort of silver-gray. 

Some one says novels are week-day ser- 
mons, and their writers week-day preachers, 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 231 

who should always take us into clean and 
good company, and I like that canon. Things 
have come to a bad pass with us, when we 
smuggle our company into the house on the 
sly, and hide them in closets, for fear the 
mothers and sisters or the wife and children 
will see them. My best and truest manhood 
bids me wash mine hands in innocency when 
I read a novel. I count it for pure worth, 
therefore^ that I early loved to read Charles 
Kingsley's stories also, and read them stilL 
They are healthful as his Devonshire moors, 
and bracing as a splendid winter's day. 

And I do not agree with Mr. Taine that 
our steadfast insistence on clean stories in 
England and America is only a mask French- 
men disdain to wear. I tell you it is the 
faith of men who propose to stand by the 
Ten Commandments, the instinct of the nations 
which are clasping hands to reach round the 
world ; and it is the rule I would commend 
to you, and the instinct, above all others. 



232 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 

It is not healthy or wealthy or wise to sit 
up late or rise up early reading novels in 
which the main end of life in the hero seems 
to be to do a murder, and the heroine to 
blunder into bigamy. I would draw no nar- 
row line. No book, Carlyle says, so it be 
clean, is to be lightly called worthless ; for 
how knowest thou, he makes the writer say, 
that I am the silliest of mortals, and with 
my long ears I may not find readers with 
ears still longer, and may be the means of 
instilling somewhat under Providence better 
than they possess ? 

But you cannot make stories and novels 
serve as the text-books, finally, of a good, 
sound education in and for your life. If you 
could, there would be no more delightful 
place in the world than the schoolroom, learn- 
ing your algebra to the twang of Cupid's 
bow. Novel-reading can never be more than 
a pleasant relaxation. The serious and anx- 
ious work of life always waits to be done all 



ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 233 

the same. And so may I not say that while 
I am glad I read such noble stories as I 
have named in my youth, and many more, if 
I had done that and no more I think you 
would not have wanted me to talk to you 
now on the companionship of good books. 



I RENE £ JEROMFS . . * . 
1 . . . % . . p^RT BOOKS 

THE "PERPETUAL PLEASURE" SERIES 

" The sketches are such as the most famous men of the country might 
be proud to own. They are original, strong, and impressive, euen the 
lightest of thsm ; and their variety, li/ie a procession of Nature, is a 
perpetual pleasure." 

A BUNCH OF ViOLETS. Original illustrations, engraved on 
wood and printed under the direction of George T. Andrew. 410, cloth, 
$3.75; Turkey morocco, $9.00; tree calf, $9.00; English seal style, $7.00. 
The new volume is akin to the former triumphs of this favorite artist, whose 
" Sketch Books " have achieved a popularity unequalled in the history of fine 
art publications. In the profusion of designs, oiiginality, and delicacy of 
treatment, the charming sketches of mountain, meadow, lake, and forest 
scenery of New England here reproduced are unexcelled. After the wealth of 
illustration which this student of nature has poured into the lap of art, to pro- 
duce a volume in which there is no deterioration of power or beauty, but, if 
possible, increased strength and enlargement of ideas, gives assurance that the 
foremost female artist in America will hold the hearts of her legion of admirers. 

NATURE'S HALLELUJAH. Presented in a series of nearly 

fifty full-page original illustrations (9'/^ x 14 inches), engraved on \vood i.y 

George T. Andrew. Elegantly bound in gold cloth, full gilt, gilt edges, 

$6.00; Turkey morocco, $12 00; tree calf, $12.00; Englisii seal style, $10.00. 

This volume has won the most cordial praise on both sides of the water. 

Mr. Francis H. Underwood, U. S. Consul at Glasgow, writes concerning it: 

" I have never seen anything superior, if equal, to the delicacy and finish of 

the engravings, and the perfection of the press-work. The copy you sent me 

has been looked over with evident and unfeigned delight by many people of 

artistic taste. Every one frankly says, ' It is impossible to produce such 

effects here,' and, whether it is possible or not, I am sure it is >toi dotie ; no 

such effects are produced on this side of the Atlantic. In this combination of 

art and workmanship, the United States leads the world; and you have a right 

to be proud of the honor of presenting such a specimen to the public." 

ONE YEAR'S SKETCH BOOK. Containing forty-six full- 
page original illustrations, engraved on wood by Andrew; in same bindings 
and at same prices as " Nature's Hallelujah." 

" Every thick, creamy page is embellished by some gems of art. Sometimes 
it is but a dash and a few trembling strokes; at others an impressive landscape, 
but in all and through all runs the master touch. Miss Jerome has the genius 
of an Angelo, and the execution of a Guido. The beauty of the sketches will 
be apparent to all, having been taken from our unrivalled New England 
scenery." — IVashi'ngton Chronicle. 

THE MESSAGE OF THE BLUEBIRD, Told to Me 
to Tell to Others. Original illustrations engraved on wood by 
Andrew. Cloth and gold, $2.00; palatine boards, ribbon ornaments, $1.00. 
" In its new bindings is one of the daintiest combinations of song and illus- 
tration ever published, exhibiting in a marked degree the fine poetic taste and 
wonderfully artistic touch which render this author's works so popular. The 
pictures are exquisite, and the verses exceedingly graceful, appealing to the 
highest sensibilities. The little volume ranks among the choicest of holiday 
souvenirs, and is beautiful and pleasing." — Boston Transcript. 

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ISTORICAL ROOKS * * * * 
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Young Fol ks' Histo r y of the Umted S tates 

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Illustrated. $1.50. 

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Young Folks' Book of American Explorers 

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Uniform with the " Young Folks' 
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The Nation in a Nutshell 

By George Makepeace Towle, author of " Heroes of History," " Young 
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Price 50 cents. 

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Young People's History of England 

By George Makepeace Towle. Cloth, illustrated. $1.50. 

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Ha ndbook of English History 

Based on " Lectures on English History," by the late M. J. Guest, and 
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English Literature of the 19th Century. By F. H. Underwood, LL.D. 
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Youn g People's History of Ireland 

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by John Boyle O'Reilly. Cloth, illustrated. $1.50. 

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terminating at the most interesting period of the whole; and the reader lays 

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R OOKS OF PflRTlCULilR INTEREST > > ' ^ 
« • • ' • TO yOUNG MEN MP WOMEN 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 

His Life, His Works, His Friendships. By George Lowell Austin. 

Profusely illustrated. Cloth, $2.00. New edition. Formerly published by 

subscription. 

" We have here a clear and popular presentation of the poet's literary life. 
The details of his personal and private life, or at least so much of it as belongs 
by right strictly to his family, has been avoided, and that properly. What the 
public have a right to know is found in this volume, in a style that is easy and 
pleasing. Here you have Longfellow as a child, as a college student, and as 
a professor in Bowdoin College; and especially does he appear here as a man 
of letters. It is a charming volume." — Christiari Standard. 

LIFE AND TIME^ OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

By George Lowell Austin. With steel portrait and illustrations. Cloth, 
$1.50. New edition. The only complete Life of the great agitator. 
'■ The life of a man who was so strongly identified with one of the most 
stirring periods in American history must necessarily be one of much interest, 
and Mr. Austin has succeeded in presenting its features in a very attractive 
way. Portions of Mr. Phillips's most important public addresses are given, 
and there are reminiscences of the man by some of his close friends and asso- 
ciates." — Philadelphia Record. 

Wendell Phillips's Lectures, Orations, and Letters, to 1861. 563 pages. 

Library edition. 8vo $2 50 

Popular edition, with Biographical Sketch, i6mo i 00 

The Scholar in a Republic. Paper, 8vo 25 

Eulogy of Garrison. Paper, 8vo 25 

Lost Arts. Paper, 8vo 25 

Daniel O'Connell. Paper, 8vo 25 

Labor Question. Paper, 8vo 25 

LIFE AND DEEDS OF GENERAL U. S. GRANT 

By Rev. P. C. Headlev and George Lowell Austin. Profusely illustrated. 

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The materials for the early years of the subject of this popular biography 
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and exceedingly popular. 

Oliver Optic's OUR STANDARD BEARER 

Or the Life of General Ulysses S. Grant, his youth, his manhood, his cam- 
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abroad, his sickness and death. Cloth; illustrated by Thomas Nast and 
others, elegantly bound, $1.50. 
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E 



NGLISH AS IT SHOULD 



BE WRITTEN 



Handbooks for 

All Lovers of 

Correct 

Language 



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PUNCTUATION AND OTHER TYPOGRAPHICAL MATTERS 

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1000 BLUNDERS IN ENGLISH 

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HINTS AND HELPS 

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ENGLISH SYNONYM ES DISCRIMINATED 

By Rev. Richard Whately, D.D., the Archbishop of Dublin. A new 
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CAMPBELL'S HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH SYNONYMES 

With an Appendix showing the Correct Uses of Prepositions. 

HINTS ON LANGUAGE 

In connection with Sight Reading and Writing in Primary' and Intermediate 
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FORGOTTEN MEANINGS 

Or, An Hour with the Dictionary. By Alfred Waites, author of 
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SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS 

By Thomas Wentvvorth Higginson, author of " Young Folks' History 
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HINTS ON WRITING AND SPEECH-MAKING 

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An Index to the authorship of the most noted Works in Ancient and Modem 
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HUMAN LIFE IN SHAKESPEARE 

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LIFE AND TIMES OF JESUS 

As related by Thomas Didymus. By Rev. James Freeman Clarke. 

New edition. Cloth, $1.50. 

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CHRISTIAN MORALS 

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LEE AND SHEPARD'S LIBRARY EDITION 17 VOLUMES 

A Woman s Inheritance Hope Mills Seven Daughters 

Claudia In Trust Stephen Dane 

Floyd Grandcn's Honor Lost in a Great City Sydnie Adriance 

Foes of Hor Household Nelly Kinnard's King- The Old Woman who 
From Hand to Mouth dom Lived in a Shoe 

Horns Nook Out of the Wreck Whom Kathie Married 

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B 



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RIGHT 

AND 
REEZY - - - - BY SIX BRIGHT WOMEN 



A WINTER IN CENTRAL AMERICA AND MEXICO 

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A SUMMER IN THE AZORES, with a Glimpse cf Madeira 

By Miss C. Alice Baker. Little Classic style. Cloth, gilt edges, $1.25. 
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LIFE AT PUGET SOUND 

With sketches of travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon, 
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BEATEN PATHS ; or, A Woman's Vacation in Europe 

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AN AMERICAN GIRL ABROAD 

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BRITONS AND MUSCOVITES; or. Traits of Two Empires 

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OVER THE OCEAN; or. Sights and Scenes in Foreign Lands 
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DRIFTING ROUND THE WORLD; A Boy's Adventures by 

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"Out of the beaten track" in its course of travel, record of adventures, 
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and adventurous ; and the book is in every way interesting and attractive. 

EDWARD GREEV'S JAPANESE SERIES 
YOUNG AMERICANS IN JAPAN ; or. The Adventures of the 

Jewett Family and their Friend Oto Nambo 
With 170 full-page and letter-press illustrations. Royal Svo, 7 x 9^ inches. 
Handsomely illuminated cover. $1.75. Cloth, black and gold, .$2.50. 
This story, though essentially a work of fiction, is filled with interesting and 
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land of the rising sun. 

THE WONDERFUL CITY OF TOKIO; or, The Further Ad- 
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With i6g illustrations. Royal Svo, 7x95 inches. With cover in gold and 

colors, designed by the author. $1.75. Cloth, black and gold, $2.50. 

" A book full of delightful information. The author has the happy gift of 

permitting the reader to view things as he saw them. The illustrations are 

mostly drawn by a Japanese artist, and are very unique." — Chicago Herald. 

THE BEAR WORSHIPPERS OF YEZO AND THE ISLAND 
OF KARAFUTO ; being the further Adventures of the 
Jewett Family and their Friend Oto Nambo 

180 illustrations. Boards, $1.75. Cloth, $2.50. 

Graphic pen and pencil pictures of the remarkable bearded people who live 
in the north of Japan. The illustrations are by native Japanese artists, and 
give queer pictures of a queer people, who have been seldom visited. 

HARR't \N. FRENCH'S BOOKS 
OUR BOYS IN INDIA 

The wanderings of two young Americans in Hindustan, with their exciting 

adventures on the sacred rivers and wild mountains. With 145 illustrations. 

Royal Svo, 7 x 9.5 inches. Bound in emblematic covers of Oriental design, 

$1.75. Cloth, bfack and gold, $2.50. 

While it has all the exciting interest of a romance, it is remarkably vivid in 
its pictures of manners and customs in the land of the Hindu. The illustra- 
tions are many and excellent. 

OUR BOYS IN CHINA 

The adventures of two young Americans, wrecked in the China Sea on their 
return from India, with their strange wanderings through the Chinese 
Empire.* 188 illustrations. Boards, ornamental covers in colors and gold, 
$1.75. Cloth, $2.50. 
This gives the further adventures of" Our Boys" of India fame in the land 

of Teas and Queues. 



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GERMANY SEEN WITHOUT SPECTACLES; or, Random 
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points in the Empire 
By Henry Ruggles, late United States Consul at the Island of Malta, and 

at Barcelona, Spain. $1.50. 

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with stout American prejudices, and has made withal a most entertaining 
book . ' ' — New- York Trib u ne. 
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Hasty Flight in the Countries of Europe 
By Walter Harkiman (ex-Governor of New Hampshire). $1.50. 

" The author, in his graphic description of these sacred localities, refers 
with great aptness to scenes and personages which history has made famous. 
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Travels in Mexico, with vivid descriptions of manners and customs, form a 
large part of this striking narrative of a fourteen-months' voyage. 
VOYAGE OF THE PAPER CANOE 
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Gulf of Mexico. By Nathaniel H. Bishop. With numerous illustra- 
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FOUR MONTHS IN A SNEAK-BOX 
A Boat Voyage of Twenty-six Hundred Miles down the Ohio and Mississippi 

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numerous maps and illustrations. $1.50. 

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A THOUSAND MILES' WALK ACROSS SOUTH AMERICA, 

Over the Pampas and the Andes 
By Nathaniel H. Bishop. Crown 8vo. New edition. Illustrated. $1.50. 

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wish there had been more." 
CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES 
Being the Adventures of a Naturalist Bird-hunting in the West-India Islands. 

By Fred A. Oher. New edition. With maps and illustrations. $1.50. 

"During two years he visited mountains, forests, and people, that few, if 
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photographed from nature the scenes by which the book is illustrated." — 
Lonisville Courier-Journal. 
ENGLAND FROM A BACK V/INDOW; With Views of 

Scotland and Ireland 
By J. M. Bailey, the " ' Danbury News' Man." i2mo. $1.00, 

" The peculiar humor of this writer is well known. The British Isles have 
never before been looked at in just the same way, — at least, not by any one 
who has notified us of the fact. Mr. Bailey's travels possess, accordingly, a 
value of their own for the reader, no matter how many previous records of 
journeys in the mother country he may have read." — Rochester Express. 



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